Mountain Leaves – Free WordPress Theme

Today we have a very clean ported theme, originally designed as a free template by Brad of DemusDesign, and ported into WordPress by myself. This theme has the usual Gravatar support and WordPress tag support. This theme is coded for WordPress 2.7 and above only, which means it won’t work in previous versions of WordPress, but also means you can take advantage of threaded comments and comment pagination.

There are three widgetized areas as well as a convenient theme options page where you can change a number of things, both of which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the widget areas and theme options page…

Widgetized Areas

This theme is broken up into three widgetized areas. Two are in the sidebar and one in the footer. The following diagram will illustrate where exactly these are located.

Okay, the sidebar and footer are pretty straightforward, but what are the “testimonials” for exactly? Well, you can put any text you want in there pretty much whether it be a site slogan, testimonial, or something else. It’s best if you use the text widget only for this widgetized area. If you can’t think of anything to put there, no worries, because it can be easily removed in the theme options page.

Theme Options

This theme comes with a simple options page, where you can control a few aspects of the theme. Simply go to Appearance -> Mountain Leaves Options. Here’s what it looks like:

The first part of the options page is for the “About Me” portion of the footer, since I figured it wouldn’t be practical as a text widget.

• Title: You could change this to something like “About Us” or “About This Blog,” whatever you think would be appropriate. The default is set to: “About Me”
• Image URL: If you have a small avatar-like image (around 42×42), simply put the full path to that image in this box. If you don’t have one, no problem. No image will be displayed if that is the case.
• Message: You can write a little about yourself and/or your blog in this box. Just a few sentences would be enough.

The second part of the options page are just quick options for the sidebar area.

• Sidebar Title: This is how you change the green text displayed directly above the sidebar widget area (mapped out in the diagram above). The default is set to: “This is the sidebar”
• Disable Testimonials Widget: Like I mentioned above, you can disable the testimonials widget. You can do this by simply checking off this box. Even if you have the text widgets defined for the “Testimonials” area, they won’t be displayed if this box is checked.

Thanks once again to this post from the Theme Forest blog for the code used, which I also used for the Underwater theme (also designed by DemusDesign).

Conclusion

I really like this design, and I think it could be customized into different looks, while still using the same theme code base. For example, replace the autumn trees header background image with something else, change the colors, etc. If anyone has any suggestions on possible styles to be based on the Mountain Leaves theme in the form of child themes, I’m all ears.

Well, that should be just about everything. If you have any quick questions, feel free to comment on this post. Remember, support related queries should go in the support forums. I do my best to check there daily. Hope you like the theme. Enjoy!