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Agregado: A Free Wordpress Theme

September 8th, 2008 in Freebies | 179 Comments

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community.

We support them both financially and with a broad coverage on our magazine. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Agregado Lifestream Theme — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson of Category4. The theme features a built-in lifestream module and contact form with custom control panel options. It is commissioned by Smashing Magazine and designed 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.

Live Demo
Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.2 Mb)
Additional FAQ & Documentation

Motivation behind the design

Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.

“Agregado was inspired by the recent popularity of services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr, and by a recent trend Zeldman calls 'the vanishing personal website'. The theme attempts to rebuild that idea of a personal website, incorporating a lifestream carousel alongside standard blog posts, keeping your fragmented data all in one place.

The lifestream code was inspired by Kieran Delaney's WP plugin "SimpleLife", but rewritten to fix bugs and caching issues. The code is built right into the functions.php file, with control panel options which include contact form configuration. There are other 'personal site' touches - a user profile box with gravatar and bio, plus the built-in contact form. First-time visitors get an easy sense of who you are, what services you use, and how to get in touch.

The design itself intentionally deviates from the standard WordPress layout. Hierarchy is key - lesser content modules (Subcategories, Pages, Monthly Archives, Search) are tucked away so the user stays primarily focused on recent blog posts and recent lifestream items. Newer items are lighter with a larger font size, and get incrementally smaller and darker as they get older.

The theme also contains a custom Archives page. In the past, blindly clicking a monthly archive link (ex: "November 2006") has never been useful to me, so I decided to display all posts in a grid format, chronologically, and categorized by month and year. If you find bugs, please leave a comment. We will continue upgrading the theme as necessary.”

Thank you, Darren and Matt. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

Features

Lifestream module with carousel
Custom archives page
Animated js dropdown menus
Built-in contact form module with AJAX sent/fail message
Built-in drop caps for lead paragraphs
Numerical pagination on archive and search pages
Author-highlighting for comments
User profile module
Widgetized bottom bar on homepage
Widgetized sidebar on single post pages
Print stylesheet
'More in this Category' sidebar module
Control panel options for lifestream and contact form

Requirements

WordPress 2.6+
Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, IE7+
Host server with PHP5+ installed

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:

Published in Freebies, September 8th, 2008
Tags: downloads, free, Freebies, theme, wordpress

1.

Angelfire (September 8th, 2008, 9:38 am)

Excelente theme, good design, I have a question, why dont puts a demo?
2.

Tony Nachev (September 8th, 2008, 9:41 am)

As a wordpress designer I must say this is astonishing !
3.

Arthur (September 8th, 2008, 9:49 am)

Agregado is portuguesse for syndicated.
4.

Tom Sinclair (September 8th, 2008, 9:50 am)

Really nice theme for look and functionality :)
5.

Ben Jacob (September 8th, 2008, 9:54 am)

Wow.. Stunning design !.. I liked the layout verymuch
6.

Chad (September 8th, 2008, 9:59 am)

Beautiful work guys!
7.

Gelay (September 8th, 2008, 10:02 am)

Wow!!!
8.

liam (September 8th, 2008, 10:03 am)

Truly amazing work. Congratulations to all people involved in making such a wonderful theme.
9.

Ivo (September 8th, 2008, 10:23 am)

amazing wordpress theme
10.

Francis (September 8th, 2008, 10:30 am)

Great job guys !
11.

Paul (September 8th, 2008, 10:30 am)

This one definetly looks awesome.
12.

Manuel (September 8th, 2008, 10:44 am)

Great work! Looks nice…
13.

Ammy Sriyunyongwat (September 8th, 2008, 10:51 am)

You misspelled “impressive” in the second paragraph.

The theme looks fabulous, btw!
14.

Kalmee (September 8th, 2008, 10:53 am)

As a design is stunning, but lacks when it comes to functionality. Newbies ar not familar with these kind of themes, they want simple and clear design. My opion…
Have a good day everyone.
15.

ahren (September 8th, 2008, 11:08 am)

Great site… the psd for it would be very helpful as well!
16.

Ricardo (September 8th, 2008, 11:08 am)

Nice themes!!!
17.

Evert (September 8th, 2008, 11:33 am)

Very nice template but in version 2 I’d love to see:

- make the links to the post as a block {display:block};
- feedback on what I should fill in in which field (like a jquery hover effect);
- using […] instead of [...];
- a high contrast version for the visual disabled.

Thank you very much!
18.

Ed (September 8th, 2008, 11:42 am)

Amazing in so many ways.
19.

Christy (September 8th, 2008, 11:50 am)

I like it and plan on playing with it; would just like to see more icons as far as the lifestream goes - I have so many more services that I use and would love to see the icon set expanded.
20.

Aslak (September 8th, 2008, 11:50 am)

“Requirements: Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, IE7+”

Why Firefox 2 or Safari 2 won’t do, while IE7 with its ancient CSS support is okay? And why to list browsers instead of simply specifying the required CSS version?
21.

balachandar (September 8th, 2008, 12:15 pm)

Brilliant. I was experimenting the lifestreamer CMS sweercron recently and was looking for some of the functions in a WP theme. Here it is. Thanks Darren and Matt.
22.

Thomas Milburn (September 8th, 2008, 1:06 pm)

A brilliant Wordpress design. I like the way that the designers have really thought about how the user interacts with the site and managed to incorporate plugins into the theme itself.

If you like the drop caps in this design why not try out the Link [wordpress.org].
23.

Spence (September 8th, 2008, 1:25 pm)

Absolutely fantastic theme, just about to hack the living daylights out of it!
24.

ArtHack (September 8th, 2008, 1:37 pm)

Very good, I have reproduced
25.

Chris (September 8th, 2008, 3:46 pm)

Just a heads up, Feedburner, Google Reader, Delicious and any other service that links a feed item to a different domain than its source will not work. This is from the original SimpleLife blog:

Cheers,

Chris
Cardgazer.com
26.

Matt (September 8th, 2008, 6:22 pm)

@Chris - Actually, Darren and I were able to find a fix for Feedburner and Delicious. Both SimpleLife and Agregado use SimplePie to create one mashed up feed out of all the RSS docs you give it. SimpleLife checks the url of the link itself to assign classes to each item. That ends up breaking Delicious links (and others) because if you bookmarked yahoo.com, that’s the URL of the feed item. Agregado climbs back out of the mashed up feed to check what service the link in question comes from.

For those that are interested, the code that does the job is on lines 540 and 541 of functions.php. A solution for feedburner follows on 545-547.

As of this evening, we also added Google Reader feed support and support for plugins like Lightbox that may have caused conflicts with the method we were using to include jQuery. If you already have the theme installed, upgrading should be as easy as replacing the copy on your server with the contents of the updated zip.
27.

Darren Hoyt (September 8th, 2008, 6:31 pm)

^Thanks to Matt for clarifying, and thanks to Smashing for giving us the opportunity to release the theme! I’m happy for the good feedback so far.

Just a note to anyone who encountered permissions problems or javascript problems earlier in the day - those bugs have been squashed. Feel free to download the theme and let us know if you run into any troubles.
28.

Mike Smith (September 8th, 2008, 8:00 pm)

Darren & Matt - Awesome theme. Definitely eye catching. Thank you for releasing it.

@Smashing Magazine, thank you for featuring work like this. It’s awesome.
29.

Zack (September 8th, 2008, 9:35 pm)

this theme is great. Any chance we can get the source files added to adjust the background?
30.

Sajid Iqbal (September 8th, 2008, 11:03 pm)

Very cool theme. I am gonna use it on my personal blog, translating it to URDU.
31.

Stef (September 8th, 2008, 11:16 pm)

Millions of thanks ! this theme is outstanding !
i think i will use too for my blog.

one more time, GREAT gift for us Smashing Magazine, thanks too :)
32.

Fodcj (September 8th, 2008, 11:25 pm)

Love it. Fantastic work and thanks for making it free.
33.

Eric (September 9th, 2008, 12:00 am)

Not a fan of lifestreaming, but this is certainly an attractive and well crafted design.
34.

Tobias Goth (September 9th, 2008, 12:24 am)

A true beauty!
35.

Tschai (September 9th, 2008, 1:25 am)

Very slick and subtle: simpy one of the best around!
36.

Etoiliste (September 9th, 2008, 1:26 am)

Great !!!
37.

RMK (September 9th, 2008, 2:47 am)

Really nice theme - visually and structuraly.
I’m not sure it fits my needs (I use a lot of big images), but I will definitely give it a try!
38.

WPJunkie (September 9th, 2008, 4:10 am)

Very nice and simplistic
I like it
I really love the “Find me Elsewhere” section!
39.

m.o.m. (September 9th, 2008, 4:35 am)

Really Nice! Good Work! I Like the Livestream Function.
Greets from Berlin Germany Link [momworx.de]
40.

Neowster (September 9th, 2008, 4:38 am)

Looks great and just blows “premium” themes away. I still can believe its free. Keep it up!
41.

Jsamlarose (September 9th, 2008, 5:00 am)

Adding a voice to the chorus: great theme!

One question. I’ve installed it to play with, and everything seems to work fine, but I get an error when I try to access the archives page:

“The requested URL /wp-content/themes/agregado/archive was not found on this server.”

Archive.php and Archives.php are definitely there in the right folder. Anyone have any suggestions as to what’s going wrong there?

Thanks…
42.

Spence (September 9th, 2008, 5:53 am)

@jsamlarose, check out the page here:

Link [www.darrenhoyt.com]

It’s in the FAQ’s
43.

Jsamlarose (September 9th, 2008, 6:25 am)

Excellent. Much obliged.
44.

Rick (September 9th, 2008, 7:29 am)

One of the best themes I have seen so far. Absolutely superb!
45.

Chris (September 9th, 2008, 10:07 am)

What a great theme! Fantastic! Thank you.

I’m having a slight problem in that the Find Me Else where section just displays a white rectangle and no content. Any ideas?

Many thanks.
46.

Srecko Bradic (September 9th, 2008, 2:02 pm)

Excellent theme with very good features!!! And all for free :)
47.

EmmaB (September 9th, 2008, 5:03 pm)

OMG! This is totally perfect for my online portfolio! With a little tweaking it will have all I need!
48.

Ashrith Maudgalya (September 9th, 2008, 7:49 pm)

ITS COOL!!!! i am using it now :D
49.

Hussein (September 10th, 2008, 6:08 am)

This is a great theme :D
50.

Allen Walker (September 10th, 2008, 1:32 pm)

So you can’t post images on the homepage?
51.

Samuel (September 10th, 2008, 5:46 pm)

The custom archives page is astonishing.
Why not release it as a Wordpress plugin?
52.

Rolando (September 10th, 2008, 6:35 pm)

Wow, what a beautiful theme!
53.

Munki (September 10th, 2008, 6:41 pm)

I love it :)

Munki | Link [www.munki.se]
54.

web about money (September 11th, 2008, 12:58 am)

Great theme!
Link [webabout.org]
55.

Massimo (September 11th, 2008, 4:25 am)

i loved it since i saw it!
56.

Keith Yager (September 12th, 2008, 9:37 am)

How would I go about changing the top menu bar use pages instead of categories?

Thanks.
57.

Tim (September 12th, 2008, 1:10 pm)

Amazing! Very nice theme…but with one issue (as it seems): The tag cloud widget appears on interior pages but isn’t active in the widget admin. I tried activating it, and then deactivating it but w/no luck. Any idea how to fix this??

Thanks!
58.

wonsore (September 12th, 2008, 4:46 pm)

hey,
thx for the great theme
but
the “get in touch” function doesn’t support chinese…
could u fix it?
59.

DeBorah Beatty (September 13th, 2008, 8:30 pm)

I’m using your theme on one of my other blogs but I can’t figure out how to get the Find Me Elsewhere function to work. All I get is a white box. Help?
60.

kevin (September 21st, 2008, 5:22 pm)

hello wonsore,
in index.php you can find contact script, change the chartset to UTF8, the chinese problem can be fixed. you can test it on my site Link [www.loadmemory.com]
61.

Radix (September 26th, 2008, 6:33 pm)

is there any way to create plurk lifestream?
62.

Adam Leow (September 28th, 2008, 4:42 pm)

I have ported this wonderful theme for Drupal. Have a look at my site Link [kahthong.com]. I’m using it right now =D
63.

yoshi (September 29th, 2008, 12:44 am)

nice theme… i’ll try
64.

DivaGeek (September 29th, 2008, 1:36 am)

I can’t figure out how to make it so excerpts show up on the main page instead of just the first one and then the titles of the rest..I suck at php..any help?

But other then that I think this is one of the best templates I’ve ever used on WP out of the box perfect..well unless your like me a bit picky.

Link [divageekdesigns.com]
65.

caturstudio (October 2nd, 2008, 7:37 am)

the excelent theme.., glamour..
66.

rickbl (October 5th, 2008, 7:30 am)

I am having trouble with text wrapping around my images on the single posts. Does anyone know how to fix this?
67.

Jeffrey Lo (October 7th, 2008, 9:38 am)

I’m having trouble with the image wrapping too. I’ve tried looking into the post css files, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
68.

Jeffrey Lo (October 7th, 2008, 9:41 am)

Sorry for double posting, but this is related to something Allen Walker (#50) posted. I think you can have images on the homepage. The way I think I’m going to do it is through the Link [wordpress.org]. Hope it helps.

If you do install the plugin, make sure you disable span markup.
69.

rickbl (October 8th, 2008, 8:46 pm)

Jeffrey Lo, to fix the image wrapping go into the posts.css and get rid of the float for .img
70.

Kristen (October 21st, 2008, 2:06 pm)

Great theme! Any ideas how to get less spam through the default contact form?
71.

markus (October 23rd, 2008, 1:10 am)

Wow, i used it on my personal Website! Awesome!!
72.

Korolev-nn (October 29th, 2008, 12:56 pm)

Very good theme
73.

Cathy Wang (October 29th, 2008, 10:53 pm)

Do you guys have any plan on releasing the lifestream code into a plugin to give back to the wordpress community?
74.

Ehab (October 31st, 2008, 3:08 pm)

Hi Cathy. I think a lot has already been given :P Would you disagree ?

You could copy paste the code into your own theme to make it work, if you don’t want to wait for the plugin.

Most of the “lifestreams” can be easily pulled via the Sidebar Widgets Rss reader.

I believe FriendFeed has a widget that you can put in your site to show your lifestream. Google on !
75.

Peter (November 5th, 2008, 3:41 pm)

Spasibo za vash trud!!
76.

Tim (November 7th, 2008, 8:51 am)

Just curious - was the search pop-up and lifestream scrolling inspired by acquia.com?
77.

emalik (November 13th, 2008, 4:47 am)

Its amazing in layout and design, just a little problem there dont know how to fix this is that it does not shows any image in the home page on main post, please help me how i can do that.

And once again thanks for that gr8 theme, for free
78.

Ben (November 24th, 2008, 10:40 am)

Beautiful theme. Any chance of getting source files like most of your other “free-mium” themes? It would be great to be able to customize the background a little.
79.

Vixtor (November 25th, 2008, 2:07 pm)

Amazing theme. Strong and beautiful i`ll use it