Infinity: 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 Infinity — a free professional WordPress-theme. The theme has 3 fixed columns, thumbnails integration, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter integration as well as an attractive visual design. The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China especially for Smashing Magazine and its 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.
- Preview (0.56 Mb)
- Download the theme (.zip-package, 2 Mb)
- Download PSD-sources (.zip-package, 7 Mb)
Features of the theme and Development Kit
- 3 fixed columns design
- Thumbnail covers style
- Flickr, Twitter and delicious integration
- not widget-ready (see the development-kit below)
Currently Yichi is working on an extended version of the theme presented above which will have a style switcher, integration with social networks and a number of JavaScript-based animations. However, at the moment it is quite buggy and he needs your help to get the theme done.
The theme (which is called Mashup) works eventually, but has some strange bugs — for instance, sometimes it freezes for some reason. Please get in touch with him to get the theme done or modify the theme directly:
- Mashup development kit
(similar to Infinity, but widget-ready and with a style-switcher)
Motivation behind the design
Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.
“Thanks to Vitaly for this great opportunity! I have to admit that I’m not very good at telling stories, basically it’s always been hard to explain every detail on how I get it done and why I did this and that… Partly the idea for this theme is based upon my own theme which has a slightly personal touch and uses vibrant and appealing colors. With some rambling designs and fancy head imagery, I’ve tried to put all pieces together to make the theme literally stand out.
Among other things, the start page window of the Infinity theme has thumnails and offers delicious-integration.
I tried to keep it as simple as possible, unlike regular post entries style, with WordPress custom filed functions. I’ve used them to show off image titles next to the thumbnails. This design decision is intended to catch reader’s attention in a better way, and it could be a huge advantage for portfolios where designers want to present their photos or design works.
I hope you enjoy this theme and I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme, and for more information please visit my website. Or feel free to ask any questions regarding the theme in comments to this post — I’ll do my best to answer them!”
Posting preview of the Infinity theme
Thank you, Yichi. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
Special requirements
- The theme has no problems in modern browsers and also works fine in Internet Explorer 6.
- WordPress 2.5 or higher is required.
- Some plug-ins are required for the theme to work (all of them are included in the download-package).
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 may be interested in the following free WordPress-themes as well:
Anjhero
August 8th, 2008 8:04 am1st.:) nice n allegant theme
Daniel
August 8th, 2008 8:09 amWow, another great theme. Thanks!
drumba
August 8th, 2008 8:26 amNice, very very nice.
Jedd
August 8th, 2008 8:30 amPlease :( where’s your beautiful and free Not Everyone Uses WordPress blogger theme
抽筋儿
August 8th, 2008 8:34 amGreat works !
Fancy
August 8th, 2008 8:35 amNICE！！
Stephane
August 8th, 2008 8:38 amThat is beautiful! Probably my favourite theme that SM has delivered so far!
max
August 8th, 2008 8:38 amhow to add thumbails too posts?
Ujo
August 8th, 2008 8:41 amSo cool….
One of best theme I ever seen….
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz
August 8th, 2008 8:43 am@max (#8): please read the readme-file.
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz
August 8th, 2008 8:44 am@Jedd (#4): you are right. And in the matter of fact, we are planning to take care of other systems (e.g. Drupal) as well.
Pallian
August 8th, 2008 8:44 amWow – this is a sweet theme! I have for sale on my site if anyone wants a professional business style theme…
katrin
August 8th, 2008 9:14 amMarvellous. Really nice theme.
Dré
August 8th, 2008 9:16 amGreat post, nice theme. Although my opinion is that to header doens’t match that well with the rest. 2 different ways of drawing. But maybe thats the purpose of this design.. Layout is cool though.
Keep up the good work! grts
AndrU
August 8th, 2008 9:25 amI love it!. NICEEE
grizzly3
August 8th, 2008 9:26 amKolejny świetny temat! Chyba zbytnio pośpieszyłem się ze zmianą wyglądu mojego bloga… :)
Jehzeel Laurente
August 8th, 2008 10:02 ami love the theme so much! me thinks to use it in my new blog.. yay!
pickupjojo
August 8th, 2008 10:09 amWow, very great work!
It makes me feel that my blog looks sooooo ugly…
Thanks for sharing. :)
Munshun
August 8th, 2008 10:16 amAwesome theme! Thank you.
I just changed the theme to this one and I’m doing some config… everything works wonderful, the only thing I just cannot make to work is to show previous pages of posts.
I saw the author’s page and that info shows at the bottom of the photos of the posts… mine shows nothing.
le blogueur masqué
August 8th, 2008 10:34 amSuperb as usual, thank you
Epidemic
August 8th, 2008 10:35 amgreeeeeeeeat theme…!!!!!!
dirk worring
August 8th, 2008 10:39 am@pallian: nice that you do work like this, as we ALL do. but i think this is not at all a advertising and sales platform (sorry for being a straight shooter here, but if we all would advertise our services, the idea of a good exange of great ideas platform would be riuned pretty soon).
am i right, dear editors?
yes, you are right (Vitaly)
Macu
August 8th, 2008 10:41 amIt has a wonderful design, but the tree´s illustration didnt follow the rest
yamaniac
August 8th, 2008 10:53 amI Love you smashing Magazine! your the best thing that ever happened to me over the internet!
Andy
August 8th, 2008 11:03 amWhere is the readme file? I must be blind? :(
Andy
August 8th, 2008 11:05 amNevermind, I found it.
*slams head on table*
Adam
August 8th, 2008 11:24 amIt is a nice theme, and superb that you are giving away great quality themes. However, on a design point of view, it has some flaws in it. For example, the illustration at the top, where the tree meets the grass. Then the grass is just stuck there. It’s like, floating in the middle of nothing. Something extra to this to correct this flaw, would make it 100x better.
Overall however, it’s a good layout.
Illi.Pro
August 8th, 2008 11:49 amNice theme, very beautiful! thanks!
Sebastian
August 8th, 2008 12:00 pmincredible theme, thx so much
Susan
August 8th, 2008 12:12 pmWow…what a good looking theme!
Tom Hermans
August 8th, 2008 12:40 pmawesome theme!
just the way I like it.
stefan alexandru
August 8th, 2008 12:43 pmLucky for dak who let me know about this. Dear smashing magazine admins, please read the email i’ve just sent you. And take the necessary measures.
Thank you.
Lindsay
August 8th, 2008 12:51 pmthanks! i switched from movable type on my [very much neglected] blog just to use this theme.
Munshun
August 8th, 2008 1:35 pmOk, I found what was “wrong” with my setup.
You need to have installed and activated the wp-pagenavi plugin.
Works like a charm.
Thank you.
liam
August 8th, 2008 1:59 pmBrilliant Stuff, nice work Yichi!
Starfeeder
August 8th, 2008 2:06 pmSeriously that is the best Theme I have seen yet! Awesome that its free! :D
Andy
August 8th, 2008 2:46 pmHow do I create pages with these theme? When I post a page the content doesn’t appear when I view it.
Thanks!
designcode
August 8th, 2008 3:13 pmThats smashing, really.
Adam
August 8th, 2008 5:01 pm@dak + @stefen…. did you even look at the theme? Its no where near inspired. It’s totally unique, so dont try and take credit.
Andrew
August 8th, 2008 5:37 pmI can’t get the Flickr photostream to work, any ideas? Positive that I have the correct information in the FlickrRSS settings inside WP
Andrew
August 8th, 2008 5:51 pmIt started working, I guess you just have to wait until it refreshes.
Lahure dai
August 8th, 2008 9:33 pmthanks that was delicious :)
Billifer
August 8th, 2008 9:40 pmThis is essentially the theme I’ve been waiting for. Thanks Yichi and Smashing!
Yichi — I’ll contact you when I’ve got a moment to take a look at the issues with the Mashup theme. I’ve done quite a bit of WP widget and plugin coding myself.
Eftu
August 8th, 2008 9:42 pmNot my type of theme, though.
stefan alexandru
August 8th, 2008 11:13 pm@Adam I don’t care about credit for these theme. Look at the date on the image from deviantart when it’s posted. And yes it’s partially inspired. And it stole the name. But copyright issues don’t really mater, if people get what they want.
Andrew
August 8th, 2008 11:49 pm@stefan
how is partially inspired? because it has stars?
Dave
August 9th, 2008 1:36 amReally nice theme. One of the best for a long time.
yichi
August 9th, 2008 1:36 amThanks Smashing Magazine for featuring this theme. I’ll write a simple README on how to use that custom filed once my personal blog back online (now it has a little database connection error)
Shaun
August 9th, 2008 5:57 amThis is a fantastic theme but I’m still using Fervens, which you showcased last time :)
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz
August 9th, 2008 6:13 am@stefan alexandru (#33): we don’t really see any resemblance. How exactly was it inspired by your theme, in your opinion?
@yichi (#53): thank you, please post the link in the comments and send it to us once it’s published.
Tim
August 9th, 2008 7:40 amAmazing work!
On a different note – Hey Stephan, I have a nice foreign auto…I dare say “infinity” that has stars hanging in the side window of the backseat. Shall I write your url on the back of my car so as to give credit to your wordpress theme? Infinity is a common name and wordpress themes are hit the net by the 1000s….get over yourself :)
chris
August 9th, 2008 8:44 am@Munshun : I figured it out, you need to download wp-PageNavi plugin:
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
chris
August 9th, 2008 8:52 amThis theme is beautiful and I intend to use it for my new blog, thank you! One question though….how do I write pages? I have 2 pages I am trying to link to but it doesn’t render them properly. Anyone figure this one out? Thanks again Yichi, and as always nice find SmashingMag!
Cheers.
chris
August 9th, 2008 9:35 amJust an FYI regarding pages…..my old ones didn’t carry over. I copied the body of my old page and pasted into a new page and it works fine.
chris
August 9th, 2008 9:37 ambah…disregard last post. No werky…on my way to his forums to see what I can find.
addictv
August 9th, 2008 9:42 amthere’s no page.php in the theme. Create one and that will solve the page problem.
Andrew
August 9th, 2008 10:41 amHey Chris, did you figure it out? I’d love to know the solution too :)
dak
August 9th, 2008 1:18 pmJust talked to alex, and calmed him down, this theme stole the name, and it looks like the original one from deviant art, but i convinced him to let it pass, it’s not worth it.
XIII
August 9th, 2008 4:15 pmAbsolutely gorgeous and original theme.
Lee
August 9th, 2008 4:28 pmIs it only me who is find the theme takes quite a while to load. If anyone can cast some light on what this could be (calls to external pages, pictures etc) then Id appreciate it. Its greatly help as although Ive tried to track down the issue through trawling through the code I cant seem to find any problems.
Secondly none of my Pages are showing up. Only a thumbnail which evebn if this is clicked does not take me to the Pages content.
Thanks to anyone who has got the time to give me a pointer or two.
Lee
August 9th, 2008 5:22 pmIt seems my issue was with flickrss which is a real shame as I liked this element a lot. Ill continue to see if I can get it to work. Anyone having troubles with flickrss? (btw Im running WP 2.5)
Ozgur
August 9th, 2008 6:57 pmThanks very nice theme.
wy
August 9th, 2008 7:05 pmwaaa. beautiful theme. but i want widget ready! damn
sebastienb
August 9th, 2008 10:55 pmAnyone know how to set your twitter account in this theme ?
Andy
August 9th, 2008 11:50 pmTo set the theme to use your twitter updates instead of yichi’s, open up “left.php” in the “theme” folder and replace…:
”
…with:
(where “YOURUSERNAME” is your twitter username)
Andy
August 9th, 2008 11:54 pmOops! Since HTML isn’t allowed (mostly) I’ll just exclude the arrows. In “left.php” (in the “theme” folder) just replace:
script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/neonfish.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1″
with..
script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/YOURUSERNAME.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=1″
(where “YOURUSERNAME” is your twitter username)
yichi
August 10th, 2008 5:09 amThank you very much, guys! I’m really happy to hear that you like it!
@Andy, A simple guide on my personal blog, hope it will help. (vikiworks.com)
@Dak and Stefan Alexandru, I like that wordpress design also, and we have something very familiar, thanks for let us know :)
@Munshun, thanks for point that out, I will put this update into README. Thanks!
@andy, I’ll add a page template later time and it will be available for downloaded at later time @ vikiworks.com
@Andrew, please make your flickr album can be access public, or please try to upgrade flickrss plugin from author’s webpsge. then lets see if it work or not?
@Lahure dai the header image, it’s a big file, I will try to some other styles and it will be as a MOD download soon, between image quality and light weight, it’s hard to pick sometime.
@billifer, good news! let you know if you have any progress and I’m glad we can publish it without errors sometime.
I’ll maintain a post for further issues on my personal blog, thanks again!
Angela
August 10th, 2008 6:18 amWow, this looks fabulous! :D
Jef
August 10th, 2008 9:54 amNice, I’m need to add a blog to my site and this would work out great.
Arjen
August 10th, 2008 10:05 amWow! This is so cool:)
aj
August 10th, 2008 11:41 amI uploaded and installed everything, but I get an error and the theme doesn’t work. This is what I’m seeing when I try to access to blog:
can anybody help me? it might be a host thing, but I don’t know.
ert2
August 10th, 2008 12:42 pmDear readers Smesha from America and Western Europe. I want to address you with the following: What they say in your news about South Ossetia – a lie. Georgia first attack on civilians and cut Ossetian civilians. These actions were planned for the entry of Georgia into NATO. Tell me those, unless it cost the lives of people?
chris
August 10th, 2008 4:30 pm@Andrew: Addictv answered the question….there was no page.php included in this theme. Create one (I just modified single.php). If you’d like a copy let me know and I will email it to ya…
Dest1ned
August 10th, 2008 5:55 pmthis theme rocks!!! thanks a lot!
N S Sugur
August 10th, 2008 9:19 pmWow! This is so cool: and complete artist maind.
ryunosuke
August 10th, 2008 10:28 pmthis is totally wicked!
Ines
August 11th, 2008 12:17 amAmazing theme, love it =)
Peter
August 11th, 2008 2:04 amThis is great.
Kalsten
August 11th, 2008 5:59 amI am using this on my blog, but i miss one thing: the blogroll. ¿It’s possible to put the blogroll in this theme without have to write code?
yichi
August 11th, 2008 9:51 am@AJ you must be installed mashup theme, right? that’s why I can’t replease it as primary design. it just keep that way all the time. since this theme was not coded myself. I’ll still trying to figure how to solve it. personally I like it, and it support theme switching, it’s quite convenience.
@Kalsten you’re absolutely right. I’ll add blogroll back in the next update. please check back on my blog later.
aj
August 11th, 2008 11:46 am@yichi
I’m not really understanding what you said.
Mashup theme – is that something I SHOULD install, if so, where do I find it?
I don’t have it installed currently.
Kalsten
August 11th, 2008 12:16 pm@yichi
Only a stupid question: your blog is http://vikiworks.com/ right?
Thx :)
Yasir
August 11th, 2008 12:38 pmif you are creating pages with worpress (for ex. i created a resume page), it didn’t show up right. it shows a preview of the blog like on the main page but that’s it. is there a page template available?
sancios
August 11th, 2008 2:47 pmHi, there is the possibility in the future to have a clearer tone? for example white?
otherwise the same structure but in different color?
Sorry for my bad english. thanks
kljkl
August 12th, 2008 1:46 amluiluiluil
kool
August 12th, 2008 4:14 amkoolest theme ever
Chris
August 12th, 2008 5:17 amreally really sorry for the crap posts. Someone please delete!? Here’s a link to the page.php on google docs:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfbwshd_11xghhb7fk
Yasir
August 12th, 2008 1:31 pmyour the man, thanks for the page.php!
Bassa
August 12th, 2008 1:50 pmHow do i remove the favicon? cant seem to find it anywhere..
Bülent Güneş
August 13th, 2008 1:51 amNice theme thanks..
talat
August 13th, 2008 9:55 amis it possible to use images alt data, title data or another custom words on thumbnails instead of post titles? and if yes. how can we do that? could you help?
Tasso Mantas
August 14th, 2008 8:25 pmChris … PLEASE SEND ME YOUR modified page.php
Please … tassomantas@hotmail.com
Tasso
August 14th, 2008 8:51 pmHey chris – I added your page.php page into the theme directory – yet i still dont see how this helps?
What am i missing … ive been up all night :$
tasarhane
August 15th, 2008 5:36 amsuper cool.. thanks
Chris
August 15th, 2008 6:40 am@tasso:
It should work….you created a new page after you added the page.php?
Tasso
August 15th, 2008 12:08 pm@chris –
i think you might be able to help me out – or someone – anyone :)
I got the pages to work – everything is great, I want to know if there is something i can add to the code if i want to have a page without categories, without twitter feed, without tags.
Although I dont want to disable those items permanently. Just specific pages.
Can someone please shed some light.
Chris
August 15th, 2008 3:59 pm@Tasso
I’d be glad to help. All the info you are referring to are in left.php and right.php. Since his theme isn’t widgetized, I’ve customized my left and right with some other stuff. My site is a work in progress but I’m happy to share:
Gabe Diaz
August 15th, 2008 7:41 pm@Tasso
I just threw up a post about adding a top navigation button and creating a page.php file for this theme. I briefly mentioned how to create custom page templates as well.
Working With the Infinity WordPress Theme
In short, to have a different look for different page you will need to create a template for each one, for example an About Page(about.php), Resume Page(resume.php) and so forth. As Chris mentioned the sidebars for this theme live in left.php and right.php. If you want a custom side for your About Page you can always create a custom sidebar(lets say aboutleft.php) and in your About Page template(about.php) you would replace where it brings in left.php with aboutleft.php
Tasso
August 15th, 2008 8:47 pm@ Chris,
You see what I’m trying to do is this – basically have a different right/left sidebar per page.
Meaning on home im content with the defaut options, yet when i get to my portfolio – i would like to use up all the real estate the page offers, instead of losing space due to that right / left sidebar.
know what i mean ?
Check out http://www.vikiworks.com ( click on portfolio) u see that he no longer has the sidebar.
Any pointerS?
chris
August 16th, 2008 4:42 am@tasso
I think there are 2 ways you could do it. The first is to call left.php or right.php dynamically from your index.php. Edit where it calls the 2 (starting at ) and add an If statement (not sure right now and no time to research). The second way is to make a copy page.php into page_no_sidebar.php and then remove the tag from this page template.
Good luck!
C