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Agregado: A Free Wordpress Theme
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:
The team here at Smashing Magazine. Mostly Sven & Vitaly.
(12 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
Loading ...- 103 Comments
- 1
- 2September 8th, 2008 9:41 am
As a wordpress designer I must say this is astonishing !
- 3September 8th, 2008 9:49 am
Agregado is portuguesse for syndicated.
- 4September 8th, 2008 9:50 am
Really nice theme for look and functionality :)
- 5September 8th, 2008 9:54 am
Wow.. Stunning design !.. I liked the layout verymuch
- 6September 8th, 2008 9:59 am
Beautiful work guys!
- 7September 8th, 2008 10:02 am
Wow!!!
- 8September 8th, 2008 10:03 am
Truly amazing work. Congratulations to all people involved in making such a wonderful theme.
- 9September 8th, 2008 10:23 am
amazing wordpress theme
- 10September 8th, 2008 10:30 am
Great job guys !
- 11September 8th, 2008 10:30 am
This one definetly looks awesome.
- 12September 8th, 2008 10:44 am
Great work! Looks nice…
- 13September 8th, 2008 10:51 am
You misspelled “impressive” in the second paragraph.
The theme looks fabulous, btw!
- 14September 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. - 15September 8th, 2008 11:08 am
Great site… the psd for it would be very helpful as well!
- 16September 8th, 2008 11:08 am
Nice themes!!!
- 17September 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!
- 18September 8th, 2008 11:42 am
Amazing in so many ways.
- 19September 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.
- 20September 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?
- 21September 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.
- 22September 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 drop caps plugin.
- 23September 8th, 2008 1:25 pm
Absolutely fantastic theme, just about to hack the living daylights out of it!
- 24September 8th, 2008 1:37 pm
Very good, I have reproduced
- 25
- 26September 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.
- 27September 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.
- 28September 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.
- 29September 8th, 2008 9:35 pm
this theme is great. Any chance we can get the source files added to adjust the background?
- 30September 8th, 2008 11:03 pm
Very cool theme. I am gonna use it on my personal blog, translating it to URDU.
- 31September 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 :)
- 32September 8th, 2008 11:25 pm
Love it. Fantastic work and thanks for making it free.
- 33September 9th, 2008 12:00 am
Not a fan of lifestreaming, but this is certainly an attractive and well crafted design.
- 34September 9th, 2008 12:24 am
A true beauty!
- 35September 9th, 2008 1:25 am
Very slick and subtle: simpy one of the best around!
- 36September 9th, 2008 1:26 am
Great !!!
- 37September 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! - 38September 9th, 2008 4:10 am
Very nice and simplistic
I like it
I really love the “Find me Elsewhere” section! - 39September 9th, 2008 4:35 am
Really Nice! Good Work! I Like the Livestream Function.
Greets from Berlin Germany Marcus - 40September 9th, 2008 4:38 am
Looks great and just blows “premium” themes away. I still can believe its free. Keep it up!
- 41September 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…
- 42September 9th, 2008 5:53 am
@jsamlarose, check out the page here:
http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2008/09/08/agregado-lifestream-theme-for-wordpress-released/
It’s in the FAQ’s
- 43September 9th, 2008 6:25 am
Excellent. Much obliged.
- 44September 9th, 2008 7:29 am
One of the best themes I have seen so far. Absolutely superb!
- 45September 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.
- 46September 9th, 2008 2:02 pm
Excellent theme with very good features!!! And all for free :)
- 47September 9th, 2008 5:03 pm
OMG! This is totally perfect for my online portfolio! With a little tweaking it will have all I need!
- 48September 9th, 2008 7:49 pm
ITS COOL!!!! i am using it now :D
- 49September 10th, 2008 6:08 am
This is a great theme :D
- 50September 10th, 2008 1:32 pm
So you can’t post images on the homepage?
- 51September 10th, 2008 5:46 pm
The custom archives page is astonishing.
Why not release it as a Wordpress plugin? - 52September 10th, 2008 6:35 pm
Wow, what a beautiful theme!
- 53
- 54
- 55September 11th, 2008 4:25 am
i loved it since i saw it!
- 56September 12th, 2008 9:37 am
How would I go about changing the top menu bar use pages instead of categories?
Thanks.
- 57September 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!
- 58September 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? - 59September 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?
- 60September 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 http://www.loadmemory.com - 61September 26th, 2008 6:33 pm
is there any way to create plurk lifestream?
- 62September 28th, 2008 4:42 pm
I have ported this wonderful theme for Drupal. Have a look at my site http://kahthong.com. I’m using it right now =D
- 63September 29th, 2008 12:44 am
nice theme… i’ll try
- 64September 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.
- 65October 2nd, 2008 7:37 am
the excelent theme.., glamour..
- 66October 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?
- 67October 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.
- 68October 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 Excerpt plugin. Hope it helps.
If you do install the plugin, make sure you disable span markup.
- 69October 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
- 70October 21st, 2008 2:06 pm
Great theme! Any ideas how to get less spam through the default contact form?
- 71October 23rd, 2008 1:10 am
Wow, i used it on my personal Website! Awesome!!
- 72October 29th, 2008 12:56 pm
Very good theme
- 73October 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?
- 74October 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 !
- 75November 7th, 2008 8:51 am
Just curious – was the search pop-up and lifestream scrolling inspired by acquia.com?
- 76November 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
- 77November 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.
- 78November 25th, 2008 2:07 pm
Amazing theme. Strong and beautiful i`ll use it
- 79December 8th, 2008 9:43 pm
Awesome Templates i have ever seen
- 80December 16th, 2008 12:02 pm
I’m writing from Turkey. It’s very nice that you mention this subject. Your explanations are enough.
- 81December 17th, 2008 2:44 am
Firstly, i like the color. It’s so romantic and precisely with my mood.
Totally, this is a good themes. - 82December 18th, 2008 11:22 pm
Anybody have any luck on the with the new facebook integration?
- 83January 2nd, 2009 12:58 am
Nice theme.
- 84January 5th, 2009 6:11 pm
very creative…
- 85January 17th, 2009 8:33 pm
Best theme that i have ever seen,love it !
But i find a problem that it doesn’t work well in Chinese character.For example the the fire 3 charaters are shown as unrecognizable code while others not.I guess it is the front-size problem but i don’t know how to fix it .
Could you help me ? thanks. - 86January 18th, 2009 11:27 pm
Nice theme but images go all corrupt
- 87January 29th, 2009 7:27 am
You know Darren, first time I saw this theme, it looks ..nothing special..but when I open my eyes now.. I see any sides that make me so interested (I mean i love this design), and maybe I’ll use it.
I’m not a programmer nor a designer who can see what ‘the real beauty of design’ is, but I wouldn’t deny, that Agregado is really beautiful.Good Luck, Darren!
- 88February 20th, 2009 6:20 am
 ñâîåì áëîãå ÿ ïèøó î ïðîéäåííûõ ìíîé ñîáåñåäîâàíèÿõ , è î òîì êàê òðóäíî óñòðîèòñÿ â “êðèçèñíîå âðåìÿ”.
Âû ìîæåòå íàéòè ïîëåçíûå ñòàòüè êàê âåñòè ñåáÿ ñ ðàáîòîäàòåëåì, êàê ïðàâèëüíî îôîðìèòñÿ ïðè òðóäîóñòðîéñòâå, è êàê ïðàâèëüíî ñîáëþäàòü ðàáî÷èé êîäåêñ.
- 89February 23rd, 2009 11:55 am
thank you very much for offering this awesome theme for free. it is much appreciated. Also, HUGE THANKS for including the PSD source. Now I can customize like a madman. -ss
- 90
- 91March 11th, 2009 9:35 am
i’ve remove the float in the post.css but i still have problems if a post an image in a single post.
- 92
- 93June 3rd, 2009 7:59 am
EXCELENTE tema, lo estoy usando en mi blog y es genial. Además la adaptación es rapidÃsima y anda todo!! Es eso lo que se pide de un theme prediseñado ¿verdad?
Pueden verlo:
mi blog - 94June 6th, 2009 2:09 pm
I love this theme!
except I keep getting fatal errors whenever i activate the lifestream plugin.
also… it says that there’s “Agregado > Options” etc etc..
i dont see that anywhere. i’m using wordpress 2.7.1 if you’re wonndering. help? - 95June 11th, 2009 8:38 am
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
- 96June 26th, 2009 12:28 pm
Having trouble with imbedding video links from youtube into posts. it shows up as a “1″ with a circle around it rather than rendering the video. ideas?
Thanks for the theme, well done.
- 97July 20th, 2009 3:09 am
OkEeHI
- 98July 23rd, 2009 8:47 pm
For the new FB feed, the way I did it was to go to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php. It contains an rss feed. Copy the feed address and change notifications.php to status.php. Works for me. Here’s my remix of Agregado with the facebook feed working. I need to change out a few icons to fit my theme but other than that, I’m pretty happy with it. See it at my blog.
- 99November 9th, 2009 10:22 am
Just wanted to say thanks for the heads up on that, was setting it up for a friend and probably would have taken hours to figure this out :)
- 99
- 100July 24th, 2009 12:12 pm
Also, I like the idea of the contact form, but I’m starting to get spammed quite a bit. I think I’ll remove it for now. If anyone has any ideas to prevent the spam, let me know.
- 101September 3rd, 2009 9:59 pm
Beautiful theme…but i got an error…
“Find me Elsewhere” is not working, and i’m sure that I edited right in “Agregado Options”..Find me Elsewhere is just a white space…
Any ideas?
- 102October 6th, 2009 10:56 am
Hi guys, I installed this wonderful and beautiful theme but I have a problem with the lifestream – it seems to ignore Twitter… Or is it my fault?
I put my twitter rss feed (http://twitter.com/XXX/statuses/user_timeline/XXX.rss) into the field, but it doesn’t seem to recognize it – my tweets aren’t showing up in the lifestream…
I don’t see what I did there! D: - 103October 26th, 2009 3:26 am
I’ve the same issue as Kuka, sometimes it’s showing up, sometimes no… Any ideas ?
- 00
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- @HrvojeKC yes, that's an interesting idea. Maybe when the waiting is over, we'll write a detailed post about it.
- @benbeltran thanks, Ben, your support means a lot to us.
- @dandenney thanks for the nice words, Dan - really appreciate it.
- @TheKheiron well, it's not entirely our fault. But we will certainly learn a lot from this horrible experience.
- @fienixNYC we find the delay disappointing as well, but there is really nothing we can do here :(
- @HrvojeKC we should probably write a book about it; not a physical book, rather a PDF :)
Excelente theme, good design, I have a question, why dont puts a demo?