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If you have been following Smashing Magazine for a while you know that we love to release high-quality freebies. Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free. 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 fervens — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 3 columns of fixed width, comes in 3 flavours and is supposed to be a starting point for your projects. The theme was designed by Elena Gafita especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Main features of the theme

• 3 columns of fixed width
• widget-ready — two sidebars (both sidebars are supporting widgets, but I recommend to use the smaler one.
• the theme is using 3 plugins; 2 of them are integrated into functions.php, so there is no need to install them. These plugins are Gravatar, Recent Comments and FlickrRSS. You can use the last one to present your Flickr images in a Flickr Photostream (see the demo).

Motivation behind the design

We have provided Elena with the freedom to explore her creativity and asked her to create a fresh Wordpress-theme which could be used and extended for a variety of different projects. Here is how Elena explains what prompted her to design the theme the way it is released now.

“Fervens is the name for the new theme I made for my friends from Smashing Magazine. But what is Fervens and what does it mean? As you might know, I give Latin names to all my themes simply because I believe they are more practical, more brandable and they just feel right to me.

Fervens is supposed to stand for freshness. Summer is my favorite time of year as it always amazes us with a rainbow of sensation and colors, making this time of year the best of all. The green of the plants and trees, the blue of the water… It’s just amazing and beautiful. And this was the reason why one of the sidebars was chosen to be designed with different variations of green.

The sidebar of the theme was chosen to be designed with different variations of green.

With this new theme I have tried to get something out of that “summer freshness” and deliver it to the Web in a form of a Wordpress-theme which is easy to use and to extend. Because I couldn’t agree with Vitaly regarding the column positions we decided to make 3 versions of it:

• Fervens A (Sidebar 1, Central Column, Sidebar 2),
• Fervens B (Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, Central Column) and
• Fervens C (Central Column, Sidebar 2, Sidebar 1).

I hope you enjoy this theme as much as I enjoyed making it. Thanks Vitaly for the opportunity!

The Fervens Theme is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means that you may use it for your personal and commercial projects and you may also make any changes — just don’t remove the credits from footer. ;-)”

Elena has also designed a small button for Smashing Magazine and all Smashing readers out there. Thank you, Elena. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

Download the themes 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 for a permission first.

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

• Demo
• Download PSD (.zip-package, 0.3 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.1 Mb)
• Support and Feedback

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).

You can also subscribe to our RSS-feed , we are going to release more free Wordpress-themes in the future.