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Cellar Heat: A Free WordPress Theme

By Smashing Editorial, October 20th, 2008 in Freebies | 146 Comments | Forum

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we try to 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. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Cellar Heat: a free professional WordPress theme created by Evan Eckard. The design of this theme focuses on patterns and typography, and it comes in two flavors. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

You can use the theme freely for all of your projects without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both the 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 plan to release your modification, please ask our permission first.

Demo: Cellar Heat Dark Demo
Preview: Dark version and Light version
Download: Cellar Heat Dark (.zip, 0.8 Mb) and Cellar Heat Light (.zip, 0.8 Mb)
PSD-sources (20 .psd-files, 30.5 Mb)
Release post on Evan Eckard’s blog

Motivation behind the design

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

“After creating the Gumball Special theme based on an older website of mine called Hellbiscuit, I wanted to create a theme similar in layout that wasn’t image-driven like that one. This layout is a unique design that I produced over a couple of years ago, and it’s finally being released.

“At first I wanted to do a dark theme that would contrast with the Gumball Special design. But after creating the dark version, I decided to produce a light version as well. The only real difference between the themes is the images and style sheets. Ninety percent of the code is the same between the light and dark versions.

“Cellar Heat has a few cool features built in: gravatars are enabled, excerpts of previous and next posts appear on each page, the theme is widgetized (although I can’t guarantee they will look hot), no plug-ins need to be installed and a recent comments section appears in the footer.

Feel free to modify the code and design to fit your tastes; just please leave the footer links intact.”

Thank you, Evan. We appreciate your work and good intentions.

Last but not least…

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we may feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a free high-quality font, a WordPress theme, some wallpapers or an icon set, please contact us. We would like to support you, too (both financially and with the broad coverage of Smashing Magazine).

You may be interested in the following free WordPress themes as well:

(al)

Published in Freebies, October 20th, 2008
Tags: downloads, free, wordpress

1.

Pascal (October 20th, 2008, 6:05 am)

Nice theme to bad i dont use wordpress ! But i do like the style! nice job!
2.

Basilakis (October 20th, 2008, 6:07 am)

WOW nice theme, thank u a lot :_)
3.

Michal skrzypecki (October 20th, 2008, 6:09 am)

mmm, not my kind of taste. Don’t like these.
4.

K-IntheHouse (October 20th, 2008, 6:10 am)

Very nice theme. I love the unique home page layout. Will be sure to recommend it to folks looking for a grunge based free theme that’s of premium uquality.
5.

m.o.m. (October 20th, 2008, 6:17 am)

WOW! Really, really nice!
6.

Daniel (October 20th, 2008, 6:20 am)

Wow, I’m really liking the light version.
7.

Darren Taylor (October 20th, 2008, 6:23 am)

The preview link for the light version doesn’t work (though clicking on the image below does). Not bad but is a bit cluttered for my liking.
8.

Daniel (October 20th, 2008, 6:24 am)

Just to let you know the light version preview link does not work. It just gives us a 404 error message.
9.

Dan (October 20th, 2008, 6:33 am)

This would also make a great theme for SweetCron, the life streaming app. if someone adapted it. Fantastic work.
10.

Vladimir (October 20th, 2008, 6:39 am)

Lovely!
11.

Asdrubal (October 20th, 2008, 6:40 am)

AWESOMEEEEE!!!
12.

Ben (October 20th, 2008, 6:47 am)

Wow ! Great theme..!
13.

Gabe Diaz (October 20th, 2008, 6:48 am)

Bah, I want to check out the light version but it’s a dead link. The dark one looks nice, thanks for sharing!
14.

Yuukan (October 20th, 2008, 6:50 am)

Very cool theme, like it !
15.

manu (October 20th, 2008, 7:02 am)

It adds an imaginative background to my posts, so I like it. Thanks Evan!
16.

George (October 20th, 2008, 7:11 am)

Light preview image link seems to be broken.
17.

venzie (October 20th, 2008, 7:11 am)

overall it’s nice. i like the feel of the light one. but i never liked the idea of having same sized boxes for your content as it does not give you a proper focus.
18.

designbunny (October 20th, 2008, 7:17 am)

“We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe.”

I don’t understand how giving a valuable design to the public for free is helping designers. Good for people who want pretty websites for $0, not for designers.
19.

jeeremie (October 20th, 2008, 7:38 am)

I don’t like this theme. The design looks old fashioned to me, but I like the way posts are being displayed. It makes it easy to scan the page.

Light preview image link seems to be broken.

Yes, same here.
20.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (October 20th, 2008, 7:57 am)

The light preview image is fixed now.
21.

Vanilla Man (October 20th, 2008, 8:23 am)

One of the tags for this post is ‘wordpree’. Probably mistype?
22.

Tahir (October 20th, 2008, 8:40 am)

Are you able to include images in the posts? If so its exactly what I have been looking for
23.

Barney (October 20th, 2008, 8:46 am)

very nice!
24.

Tschai (October 20th, 2008, 9:11 am)

Very nice, indeed…
25.

Dom (October 20th, 2008, 9:26 am)

@designbunny

Exposure on a site like SM is priceless for any freelance web designer, if that’s not helping I don’t know what is…
26.

unmaker (October 20th, 2008, 9:36 am)

awesome, nice template, thanks a lot
27.

Tom (October 20th, 2008, 10:01 am)

this is simply the best theme i´ve ever seen in my life. and believe it or not, my next theme is 90% the same, even the colour stlye…..strange. i´m not sure what i do now - using this kickass-ready theme or getting mine finished!

evan, thank you for this great work. need to get you a present :)
28.

stn001 (October 20th, 2008, 12:38 pm)

Thanks a lot :-)
I will use it :-) :-)
29.

Joshua Gutteridge (October 20th, 2008, 2:00 pm)

Great theme!

Link [www.skytemedia.com]
30.

dirk worring (October 20th, 2008, 2:22 pm)

that is really awesome. i love that design. thanx o you guys at smash mag and of cour especially to evan eckard for doing such a great job! keep it up guys!
31.

kenzen (October 20th, 2008, 6:22 pm)

Cool theme. I like the light version better.
32.

Sarbjit Singh (October 20th, 2008, 8:50 pm)

Beautiful Theme

Wish I got it earlier. Just changed the theme on my blog.
33.

Jimmy Oh (October 21st, 2008, 1:41 am)

It sure is a very nice and smooth theme. Thank you Evan Eckard! Well done. =) /J
34.

M.M.H.Masud (October 21st, 2008, 2:03 am)

Nice theme. i just install it to my blog Link [www.fanphp.com].

Looks very nice and i am very pleased to user it.

can you plz do some modification in the lower widget system? if the widget has a fixed height with ajax scrolling, it will be awesome.

thanks once again for such theme. :)
35.

Paul Walker (October 21st, 2008, 2:08 am)

The RSS icon looks extremely out of place, but otherwise this is looking pretty damned good!
36.

saimonesays (October 21st, 2008, 5:40 am)

Great them, i love it
37.

Helen Tran (October 21st, 2008, 6:51 am)

I was a little disappointed with the last theme that was released but I am delighted to see this one. Very nice work!
38.

Beau Blackwell (October 21st, 2008, 6:58 am)

Beautiful themes. I really like the light version- hopefully I’ll get to use it before too long!
39.

jmpena (October 21st, 2008, 11:32 am)

hey this is a real Quality Theme.. thanks SM…

Evan Eckard you made a good one now!!!

sorry about my english!
40.

Ahmet (October 21st, 2008, 5:21 pm)

very good: thank you..
41.

leeleaf (October 21st, 2008, 8:13 pm)

nice theme! i like the dark version….n both r quite good.
42.

DazzlinDonna (October 23rd, 2008, 7:14 am)

I’m concerned by the fact that there are two javascripts in the footer (include.reinvigorate.net). What do they do? What’s the purpose? How do we know that even if those scripts are harmless, that they won’t turn into harmful hack-filled spamfests later on? Since they are hosted elsewhere, we have no control over what anyone might do to our sites.
43.

evan (October 23rd, 2008, 9:41 am)

@DazzlinDonna the reinvigorate script is just a tracking script (like google analytics). I intended to only use it on the cellarheat.com domain, but somehow it snuck into the zip files. Feel free to remove it, or re-download the files again from here or cellarheat.com (I removed it from the latest zip files and also made some minor css updates).

So don’t worry, it’s not spam or anything.
44.

Khai (October 23rd, 2008, 10:56 am)

how to add more entri in HOME?
45.

mazeru (October 23rd, 2008, 2:12 pm)

Nice Theme.. I Love WP… :-D
46.

Evan (October 23rd, 2008, 8:15 pm)

@khai You’ll have to set the post count to more than 1, and then offset the rest by however many you choose to add (currently it’s offset by 1)
47.

Khai (October 23rd, 2008, 8:37 pm)

Hi Evan.. thank you very much… i love this theme very much!! congrate!!!
48.

Khai (October 23rd, 2008, 11:47 pm)

Evan, why note at homepage, u add a link for next page.. what happen if i got so many entries but at my homepage, there is just 9 entries appear.. how to read my first entry?

Like other themes, there have a post page like this link… Link [www.urdomain.com] and more..
49.

Manfred (October 25th, 2008, 2:52 am)

Similar problem as Khai (comment 48): I want to use in home.php a chronologically navigation to previous/next posts. But this function simply reloads always the same most recent posts -> eg /page/2 /page/3 displays the same (!) posts.

A chronologically navigation is possible with archives like category or tag.

Is there any solution to navigate on the homepage chronologically to previous/next posts?

Many thanks, Manfred
50.

GrizzlyLookinFella (October 25th, 2008, 8:22 am)

An altogether brilliant theme, Evan!
It’s clean, it’s contemporary, and I think it’s easily the best of your work published on Smashing Magazine. I will certainly be using both versions quite a bit.
Major congrats, and best of luck to you in the future!
51.

Polar (October 26th, 2008, 5:01 am)

I have problem… I downloaded cellar heat dark and light and when I tested it, it doesn’t show up any of the blog posts in the little preview boxes on the home page or when you click through to view the whole post.
Is there a setting that need to be modified?
52.

CHVNX (October 27th, 2008, 6:46 am)

This is really nice. It reminds me of a few of the themes roaming around Tumblr these days.

I might set up a new blog just to run this theme, lol.
53.

Gudowski (October 27th, 2008, 4:58 pm)

Awesome template, i founded just two minuses.

1. If i have more than 3 widgets in sidebar, then 4 and 5th widget going in 3rd widget column..
2. No multiple pages, if I have 9 news, and I add 10th then no.1 is not showed, good to do before footer something like choosing “older entries” to show olders :) then this theme will be perfect. I installed it on my official site.

Link [www.gudowski.pl]
54.

evan (October 28th, 2008, 2:19 pm)

@Khai, @Manfred - Yes, that’s an issue I ran into. The way I offset the posts on the home template always defaults to the current 9. When you try to navigate cronologically, it will always default to that (wordpress keeps using the home template).

Since I needed the home and index template to differ, the only way to browse posts by date in this template is when viewing posts by category. That route works.

I’ll keep looking into the issue though, and see if there’s another template file I can use, or a different way to offset the posts. I’ll add my findings at cellarheat.com.
55.

Gudowski (October 28th, 2008, 2:19 pm)

I founded third option what is really weird in this style.

Archives ;-) its unavailable, im too lame in php to do own archives page for that style, i tryed edit archives.php from default wordpress skin but its too hard atm for me.

Archives its a good option when multiple pages are disabled (like here), on archives its can be displayed normally with multiple pages of archive.

Did somebody can do Archives.php for this style? :) please contact me. Its weird.. :P
56.

Misutsu (October 29th, 2008, 6:49 am)

Magnifique. Je pense sérieusement à l’utiliser pour mon blog ! :)
57.

Gudowski (November 1st, 2008, 1:50 am)

Damn, I need archives page to this theme :(
58.

Jesica (November 14th, 2008, 9:12 am)

Hi Evan.. i like ur design alot.. n wanna use it for my blog.. but i dont know how to do it? can you please tell me what i should do?
thanks alot!!
59.

Didou (December 18th, 2008, 3:14 am)

@ Users who need archives : I use this great theme with the “Snazzy Archives” plugin ! Access to my archives on a page linked in the menu (sorry for my english…). You can see it here Link [www.didouonline.com]

For people who don’t speak french, it’s called “aux archives”…
60.

DPencilPusher (February 22nd, 2009, 2:51 pm)

is it possible to use this theme on a wordpress hosted blog?
61.

Jewels (May 10th, 2009, 6:28 pm)

I LOVE this theme. Outstanding work, guys! And I was just thinking, it would be KILLER as a gallery/ photo-blog theme. Any thoughts to making those post squares in the center there, thumbnails of photos that link to a regular image post?