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:
Angelfire
September 8th, 2008 9:38 amExcelente theme, good design, I have a question, why dont puts a demo?
Tony Nachev
September 8th, 2008 9:41 amAs a wordpress designer I must say this is astonishing !
Arthur
September 8th, 2008 9:49 amAgregado is portuguesse for syndicated.
Tom Sinclair
September 8th, 2008 9:50 amReally nice theme for look and functionality :)
Ben Jacob
September 8th, 2008 9:54 amWow.. Stunning design !.. I liked the layout verymuch
Chad
September 8th, 2008 9:59 amBeautiful work guys!
Gelay
September 8th, 2008 10:02 amWow!!!
liam
September 8th, 2008 10:03 amTruly amazing work. Congratulations to all people involved in making such a wonderful theme.
Ivo
September 8th, 2008 10:23 amamazing wordpress theme
Francis
September 8th, 2008 10:30 amGreat job guys !
Paul
September 8th, 2008 10:30 amThis one definetly looks awesome.
Manuel
September 8th, 2008 10:44 amGreat work! Looks nice…
Ammy Sriyunyongwat
September 8th, 2008 10:51 amYou misspelled “impressive” in the second paragraph.
The theme looks fabulous, btw!
Kalmee
September 8th, 2008 10:53 amAs 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.
ahren
September 8th, 2008 11:08 amGreat site… the psd for it would be very helpful as well!
Ricardo
September 8th, 2008 11:08 amNice themes!!!
Evert
September 8th, 2008 11:33 amVery 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!
Ed
September 8th, 2008 11:42 amAmazing in so many ways.
Christy
September 8th, 2008 11:50 amI 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.
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?
balachandar
September 8th, 2008 12:15 pmBrilliant. 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.
Thomas Milburn
September 8th, 2008 1:06 pmA 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.
Spence
September 8th, 2008 1:25 pmAbsolutely fantastic theme, just about to hack the living daylights out of it!
ArtHack
September 8th, 2008 1:37 pmVery good, I have reproduced
Chris
September 8th, 2008 3:46 pmJust 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
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.
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.
Mike Smith
September 8th, 2008 8:00 pmDarren & Matt – Awesome theme. Definitely eye catching. Thank you for releasing it.
@Smashing Magazine, thank you for featuring work like this. It’s awesome.
Zack
September 8th, 2008 9:35 pmthis theme is great. Any chance we can get the source files added to adjust the background?
Sajid Iqbal
September 8th, 2008 11:03 pmVery cool theme. I am gonna use it on my personal blog, translating it to URDU.
Stef
September 8th, 2008 11:16 pmMillions 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 :)
Fodcj
September 8th, 2008 11:25 pmLove it. Fantastic work and thanks for making it free.
Eric
September 9th, 2008 12:00 amNot a fan of lifestreaming, but this is certainly an attractive and well crafted design.
Tobias Goth
September 9th, 2008 12:24 amA true beauty!
Tschai
September 9th, 2008 1:25 amVery slick and subtle: simpy one of the best around!
Etoiliste
September 9th, 2008 1:26 amGreat !!!
RMK
September 9th, 2008 2:47 amReally 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!
WPJunkie
September 9th, 2008 4:10 amVery nice and simplistic
I like it
I really love the “Find me Elsewhere” section!
m.o.m.
September 9th, 2008 4:35 amReally Nice! Good Work! I Like the Livestream Function.
Greets from Berlin Germany Marcus
Neowster
September 9th, 2008 4:38 amLooks great and just blows “premium” themes away. I still can believe its free. Keep it up!
Jsamlarose
September 9th, 2008 5:00 amAdding 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…
Spence
September 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
Jsamlarose
September 9th, 2008 6:25 amExcellent. Much obliged.
Rick
September 9th, 2008 7:29 amOne of the best themes I have seen so far. Absolutely superb!
Chris
September 9th, 2008 10:07 amWhat 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.
Srecko Bradic
September 9th, 2008 2:02 pmExcellent theme with very good features!!! And all for free :)
EmmaB
September 9th, 2008 5:03 pmOMG! This is totally perfect for my online portfolio! With a little tweaking it will have all I need!
Ashrith Maudgalya
September 9th, 2008 7:49 pmITS COOL!!!! i am using it now :D
Hussein
September 10th, 2008 6:08 amThis is a great theme :D
Allen Walker
September 10th, 2008 1:32 pmSo you can’t post images on the homepage?
Samuel
September 10th, 2008 5:46 pmThe custom archives page is astonishing.
Why not release it as a WordPress plugin?
Rolando
September 10th, 2008 6:35 pmWow, what a beautiful theme!
Munki
September 10th, 2008 6:41 pmI love it :)
Munki | munki.se
web about money
September 11th, 2008 12:58 amGreat theme!
Massimo
September 11th, 2008 4:25 ami loved it since i saw it!
Keith Yager
September 12th, 2008 9:37 amHow would I go about changing the top menu bar use pages instead of categories?
Thanks.
Tim
September 12th, 2008 1:10 pmAmazing! 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!
wonsore
September 12th, 2008 4:46 pmhey,
thx for the great theme
but
the “get in touch” function doesn’t support chinese…
could u fix it?
DeBorah Beatty
September 13th, 2008 8:30 pmI’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?
kevin
September 21st, 2008 5:22 pmhello 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
Radix
September 26th, 2008 6:33 pmis there any way to create plurk lifestream?
Adam Leow
September 28th, 2008 4:42 pmI have ported this wonderful theme for Drupal. Have a look at my site http://kahthong.com. I’m using it right now =D
yoshi
September 29th, 2008 12:44 amnice theme… i’ll try
DivaGeek
September 29th, 2008 1:36 amI 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.
http://divageekdesigns.com
caturstudio
October 2nd, 2008 7:37 amthe excelent theme.., glamour..
rickbl
October 5th, 2008 7:30 amI am having trouble with text wrapping around my images on the single posts. Does anyone know how to fix this?
Jeffrey Lo
October 7th, 2008 9:38 amI’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.
Jeffrey Lo
October 7th, 2008 9:41 amSorry 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.
rickbl
October 8th, 2008 8:46 pmJeffrey Lo, to fix the image wrapping go into the posts.css and get rid of the float for .img
Kristen
October 21st, 2008 2:06 pmGreat theme! Any ideas how to get less spam through the default contact form?
markus
October 23rd, 2008 1:10 amWow, i used it on my personal Website! Awesome!!
Korolev-nn
October 29th, 2008 12:56 pmVery good theme
Cathy Wang
October 29th, 2008 10:53 pmDo you guys have any plan on releasing the lifestream code into a plugin to give back to the wordpress community?
Ehab
October 31st, 2008 3:08 pmHi 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 !
Tim
November 7th, 2008 8:51 amJust curious – was the search pop-up and lifestream scrolling inspired by acquia.com?
emalik
November 13th, 2008 4:47 amIts 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
Ben
November 24th, 2008 10:40 amBeautiful 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.
Vixtor
November 25th, 2008 2:07 pmAmazing theme. Strong and beautiful i`ll use it
Ravinder
December 8th, 2008 9:43 pmAwesome Templates i have ever seen
dalidas
December 16th, 2008 12:02 pmI’m writing from Turkey. It’s very nice that you mention this subject. Your explanations are enough.
Indriasari
December 17th, 2008 2:44 amFirstly, i like the color. It’s so romantic and precisely with my mood.
Totally, this is a good themes.
Erskine
December 18th, 2008 11:22 pmAnybody have any luck on the with the new facebook integration?
Rian Xavier
January 2nd, 2009 12:58 amNice theme.
Wrhona
January 5th, 2009 6:11 pmvery creative…
Summer
January 17th, 2009 8:33 pmBest 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.
Ali Hussain
January 18th, 2009 11:27 pmNice theme but images go all corrupt
Edy Pang
January 29th, 2009 7:27 amYou 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!
sean steezy
February 23rd, 2009 11:55 amthank 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
veerendra
March 4th, 2009 11:16 amthanks for every thing. I liked this theme as it is. but was not suiting me for my personal portfolio. so converted colors in blues ..
Carlos
March 11th, 2009 9:35 ami’ve remove the float in the post.css but i still have problems if a post an image in a single post.
kibuibui
April 27th, 2009 1:53 amhttp://s263263774.onlinehome.fr/ it’s work
AnahíTxT
June 3rd, 2009 7:59 amEXCELENTE tema, lo estoy usando en mi blog y es genial. Además la adaptación es rapidísima y anda todo!! Es eso lo que se pide de un theme prediseñado ¿verdad?
Pueden verlo:
mi blog
Char
June 6th, 2009 2:09 pmI 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?
JamesD
June 11th, 2009 8:38 amThanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
Jeremy
June 26th, 2009 12:28 pmHaving 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.
Athdpwbb
July 20th, 2009 3:09 amOkEeHI
Mark
July 23rd, 2009 8:47 pmFor 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.
Stuart Conover
November 9th, 2009 10:22 amJust 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 :)
Mario Seijo
January 2nd, 2010 2:39 pm@Mark thanks for posting the workaround for Facebook status updates. now i’m getting data back
Mark
July 24th, 2009 12:12 pmAlso, 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.
zoop
September 3rd, 2009 9:59 pmBeautiful 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?
Kuka
October 6th, 2009 10:56 amHi 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: