Smashing Magazine
WordPress Fun: A Free WordPress Theme
If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free WordPress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.
Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.
Today we are glad to release a wordpress.fun — a free professional WordPress-theme. The theme has 2 columns, thumbnails integration, a “featured” post section as well as a nice grungy design. The theme was designed by Maleika Attawel from Germany, purchased by Smashing Magazine and is now released as a gift for our readers.
Download the theme for free!
You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask our permission first.
The main illustration (Teen Blogger (Punk Boy)) was created by ChinHang Chung and purchased by Smashing Magazine from iStockPhoto with the extended license “Electronic Items for Resale (unlimited run)”. Therefore the illustration is redistrubited legally.
- Preview (0.56 Mb)
- Download the theme (.zip-package, 2.2 Mb)
- Download PSD and EPS (.zip-package, 5.1 Mb)
Motivation behind the design: the idea
What do you generally do when you want to create a WordPress theme without having an actual client? The initial reaction would be; you despair. All the things we have learned as good web designers such as evaluating a client’s specific needs, doing proper field research, wireframing, finding the proper grid concept for content placement, selecting a colour scheme and visual elements to support content, choosing good type, tailored to … oh wait … this is just a theme.
A theme, by definition, is a subject of discourse. In the case of a WordPress theme, it can be anything. And in the delicate case of my humble theme, the subject is fun. Plain and simple. The idea was to create a theme that is fun and usable, heavy and light, eye-catching and robust, specific and yet generic enough to be used in a variety of ways. The theme is not designed to replace true and proper web design, ergo it is not tailored to suit a specifc niche, nor complement distinctive content. However, depending on your explicit or non-explicit purposes, the design might find a good home.
The prerequisites
Like all creative processes, it started with an idea. While I am a great fan of minimalistic designs, I also admire complex and graphically intense web compositions. The only prerequisite was that it doesn’t take ages to load and that the total size of the graphics doesn’t add up to an enormous sum that would only enable those with mighty speedy internet connections to work. That was the only aspect I had to keep in mind to get started.
The design process
I had decided on going with a simple two column layout. No fancy modular or column grid, but a simple hierarchical grid like the majority of blogs use. As a page’s length is variable, it was clear that only the content that is extra but not mandantory could reside at the bottom of the page. So all navigational aids (such as categories or friends’ links) as well as a “most discussed” feature would take their position at the very end of the page.
Because I wanted to keep it as elementary as possible and void content clutter, it was clear to me to do away with too many features that would blur instead of sharpen the reader’s perception when visiting the site. Hence, I kept it rather simple and thus set aside the left column for featured content and the right column to display the newest blog entries.
Here you have the result of my humble efforts (preview) and here you can download the theme for free.
Special requirements
The theme is built with WordPress 2.5.1 and is only partially backwards compatible. The theme also works with WordPress 2.6. As this theme uses a few .png files, it is recommended that you make sure that the image paths to these are correct (for IE6). You find the two CSS rules in the ie.css file inside your theme folder. The theme can be used with or without widgets (below the fold).
Last but not least…
We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.
If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a WordPress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).
The team here at Smashing Magazine. Mostly Sven & Vitaly.
- 271 Comments
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June 8th, 2009 8:57 amIch finde das Design großartig, aber wie kann ich die featured article anzeigen lassen? Bei mir bleibt der Bereich leer. Bitte um Antwort!
Gruß, Sascha
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July 6th, 2009 8:23 amThis may be a dumb question, but for the images like “contact”, etc. How do I add my own email so when the person clicks the image, they end up sending an email to me?
thanks
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August 10th, 2009 11:53 amDanke für das Design. Nutze es in meinem neuem Blog.
Liebe grüße von Lübeck nach Lübeck - 255
August 22nd, 2009 11:19 amLove this theme but am wondering if there is a way to make the extra columns at the bottom (Categories, Most Discussed, Links) extend down as you add text in there. It seems as though I am limited to only 9 categories and if I create more categories than that the category list extends down but the grey background in the Categories box does not extend. Any help is greatly appreciated!
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September 23rd, 2009 8:02 pmIt’s very cool, I like it.
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October 2nd, 2009 11:23 amCool design. I like it lots. Thanks
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October 7th, 2009 2:58 amhi there… i really loved your theme.. a loooootttt…. =)
i was wondering, how do i change th home page font “wordpress for fun” into my blog tittle….
and also change some of the widget…..
you have to excuse me… i’m a newbie….
please help….- 259
January 25th, 2010 11:37 amThe easiest way would be to edit the image “logo.gif” and change it to say something else. It has a transparent background, so if you make a new image make sure to make it .gif or .png with a transparent background, with the same name. Just overwrite the old image file.
Hope that helps!
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October 7th, 2009 5:35 pmWhat do I need to do in order to get the homepage thumbnails to display? I created a Custom Field called “thumb” and added the link to the 125×125 image, but it displays the image name in text.
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December 27th, 2009 5:15 amMake sure the path is correct, usually that’s the source of the problem. Good luck!
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January 25th, 2010 11:36 amto make the images appear, make sure to use the img src code in your extra field – once you create the “thumb” extra field, input it something like this –
Put the full path just to be safe, and you should be good to go. Took me a bit to figure that one out :)
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October 23rd, 2009 11:20 amThis is a great theme. The only problem I am having is the archive page. I’ve created a page named “archives” w/ the archives theme set for that page. I cant get it to show up when you click the archive button in the navigation bar. When I click that button is says the archive page address is “http://fiala06.com/?page_id=18″ when its actally “http://fiala06.com/archives”.
Site: http://www.fiala06.com
Any thoughts? Thanks- 265
November 7th, 2009 1:25 pmRead the ReadMe :)
For your Archives page, Edit the page and use the archive template (on the right, under the save button)
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December 30th, 2009 12:21 pmHello, I am using your theme but I have a small problem with the featured post item. It is working, but not properly. It won’t show the latest items from a certain category, it just shows the latest posts in general, alltho I think i got the coding right.
Can you maybe help me?
This is what I’ve got; ‘?cat=17=featured&showposts=5′ - 267
January 15th, 2010 4:52 pmHello ….
You can use a nice theme ….
Can I ask you something …??Posting images on the left sidebar and featured parts Why’d you want to know
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February 10th, 2010 11:47 amI uploaded your theme to wordpress and was messing with the widgets. I can not figure out how to get any desired widgets to show on the page. The only sidebar content is what was coded in php – nothing from wordpress will show. How do I add widgets to the sidebar on this theme?
Thanks
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February 25th, 2010 5:40 amThanks for a great theme.
In order to get the pictures work in Featured, you need to add this code into colum-one.php
ID, $key, true); ?>
My version is at http://www.clausbonne.com/wordpress
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May 19th, 2010 8:55 amIm using this template and i find some minor bug, in the index.php the post is recovery with the and the quotes like “” are not showing so some plugins dont work like wp-syntax.
If you click in the post you can see correctly so i change in the index the for
Best Regards.
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July 12th, 2010 2:15 pmyour page very nice. Thanks
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very nice :-)