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Cellar Heat: A Free WordPress Theme
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:
- Simply Ornate: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Agregado: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Infinity: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Wordpress.Fun: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Fervens: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Dilectio: A Free Wordpress Theme
- Smashing: A Free Wordpress Theme
(al)
The team here at Smashing Magazine. Mostly Sven & Vitaly.
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Loading ...- 64 Comments
- 1
- 2October 20th, 2008 6:07 am
WOW nice theme, thank u a lot :_)
- 3October 20th, 2008 6:09 am
mmm, not my kind of taste. Don’t like these.
- 4October 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.
- 5October 20th, 2008 6:17 am
WOW! Really, really nice!
- 6October 20th, 2008 6:20 am
Wow, I’m really liking the light version.
- 7October 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.
- 8October 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.
- 9October 20th, 2008 6:33 am
This would also make a great theme for SweetCron, the life streaming app. if someone adapted it. Fantastic work.
- 10October 20th, 2008 6:39 am
Lovely!
- 11October 20th, 2008 6:40 am
AWESOMEEEEE!!!
- 12October 20th, 2008 6:47 am
Wow ! Great theme..!
- 13October 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!
- 14October 20th, 2008 6:50 am
Very cool theme, like it !
- 15October 20th, 2008 7:02 am
It adds an imaginative background to my posts, so I like it. Thanks Evan!
- 16October 20th, 2008 7:11 am
Light preview image link seems to be broken.
- 17October 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.
- 18October 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.
- 19October 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.
- 20October 20th, 2008 7:57 am
The light preview image is fixed now.
- 21October 20th, 2008 8:23 am
One of the tags for this post is ‘wordpree’. Probably mistype?
- 22October 20th, 2008 8:40 am
Are you able to include images in the posts? If so its exactly what I have been looking for
- 23October 20th, 2008 8:46 am
very nice!
- 24October 20th, 2008 9:11 am
Very nice, indeed…
- 25October 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…
- 26October 20th, 2008 9:36 am
awesome, nice template, thanks a lot
- 27October 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 :)
- 28October 20th, 2008 12:38 pm
Thanks a lot :-)
I will use it :-) :-) - 29
- 30October 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!
- 31October 20th, 2008 6:22 pm
Cool theme. I like the light version better.
- 32October 20th, 2008 8:50 pm
Beautiful Theme
Wish I got it earlier. Just changed the theme on my blog.
- 33October 21st, 2008 1:41 am
It sure is a very nice and smooth theme. Thank you Evan Eckard! Well done. =) /J
- 34October 21st, 2008 2:03 am
Nice theme. i just install it to my blog http://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. :)
- 35October 21st, 2008 2:08 am
The RSS icon looks extremely out of place, but otherwise this is looking pretty damned good!
- 36October 21st, 2008 5:40 am
Great them, i love it
- 37October 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!
- 38October 21st, 2008 6:58 am
Beautiful themes. I really like the light version- hopefully I’ll get to use it before too long!
- 39October 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!
- 40October 21st, 2008 5:21 pm
very good: thank you..
- 41October 21st, 2008 8:13 pm
nice theme! i like the dark version….n both r quite good.
- 42October 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.
- 43October 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.
- 44October 23rd, 2008 10:56 am
how to add more entri in HOME?
- 45October 23rd, 2008 2:12 pm
Nice Theme.. I Love WP… :-D
- 46October 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)
- 47October 23rd, 2008 8:37 pm
Hi Evan.. thank you very much… i love this theme very much!! congrate!!!
- 48October 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… http://www.urdomain.com/page/2/ and more..
- 49October 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
- 50October 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! - 51October 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? - 52October 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.
- 53October 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. - 54October 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.
- 55October 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
- 56October 29th, 2008 6:49 am
Magnifique. Je pense sérieusement à l’utiliser pour mon blog ! :)
- 57November 1st, 2008 1:50 am
Damn, I need archives page to this theme :(
- 58November 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!! - 59December 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 Clic
For people who don’t speak french, it’s called “aux archives”…
- 60February 22nd, 2009 2:51 pm
is it possible to use this theme on a wordpress hosted blog?
- 61May 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?
- 62September 23rd, 2009 7:26 am
Hi @all!
I want to know if they’re hacked or just free with GNU/GPL License for sharing this website templates …. I want to use one of them for my new weblog …. - 63September 24th, 2009 5:04 pm
Any progress with adding navigation to older posts from the home page? How about support for archives? Many thanks.
- 64October 29th, 2009 9:16 pm
Gorgeous. Would it be considered redistribution to install it as an option on a WP MU site with multiple blogs?
- 00
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- @ilmv oh ok then ;)
- @ilmv no, the SM Book will not be out of date :) We made sure it contains universal design, usability and marketing principles.
- Apple ad bombing Windows 7 on Google - http://bit.ly/28ctPq
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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.
Nice theme to bad i dont use wordpress ! But i do like the style! nice job!