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Just recently we asked you to let us know what theme you would like us to release next. Among numerous comments we found many request for a gallery-theme that could be particularly useful for portfolios and showcases. At the very same time Christopher Wallace has been designing an advanced gallery-WordPress-theme for the design community and Smashing Magazine’s audience. And today finally we are proud to release it – for free, of course.

Gallery WordPress Theme

Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style Thematic child theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It is extremely flexible and can be used as a starting point for design galleries and portfolios.

This theme can be seen in action on MixCSS.com, which is being launched as a high-end design gallery that showcases the true power of the Gallery theme. You can subscribe to the MixCSS.com RSS feed or check out the live site, which acts as a demo for the Gallery theme.

As always, the template is completely free and may be used for any private or commercial project without any restrictions whatsoever.

Gallery is packed with loads of cool features like a jQuery slide hover effect on thumbnails, lazyloading for thumbnails (great if using a lot of thumbnails on one page), built-in social media links for each gallery item and seamless integration with the following plugins: WP-PostRatings, BuySellAds plugin, and Contact Form 7.

If you'd like an endless wall of thumbnails, LazyLoad allows you to show as many posts on the homepage as you'd like, allowing your users to scroll endlessly down the page without having to load hundreds of images right away. This effect mimics "endless scroll."

Gallery also supports WordPress 2.7 threaded comments for an elegant commenting experience.

Social media links allow you to save each gallery item to Delicious.com or post a link to the gallery page in your twitter feed. Social media icons provided by Rogie King.

Features

• WordPress 2.7 compatible
• Built on the Thematic framework
• jQuery hover effects
• 'Save to Delicious' link
• 'Tweet This' link
• Flexible footer widget area
• WP-PostRatings integration
• Contact Form 7 integration
• BuySellAds plugin integration

Usage/Installation

To use the Gallery Theme, you will need to follow these installation instructions:

1. Download the latest version of Thematic.
2. Download the latest version of the Gallery WordPress theme.
3. Unzip and upload both themes to your "wp-content/themes/" directory.
4. In WordPress, go to "Appearance > Themes" and activate the "Gallery" theme.
5. To change the number of items displayed on the home page, go to
   "Settings > Reading" and change "Blog pages show at most" to 28 (4
   rows) or 35 (5 rows) or more for the LazyLoad plugin to work its magic. LazyLoader will automatically delay loading of thumbnails that are out of the user's view.

Adding Gallery Items

To use the default options for the Gallery Theme, here are instructions for creating gallery entries:

1. Create a thumbnail for each entry sized 125×125
2. Create a full-sized image for each entry sized 500×375
3. Upload both images to /wp-content/uploads or use the image uploader in WordPress to upload the images to the same folder
4. Next, create a custom field called "thumbnail" and enter the
   location of the thumbnail file, for example
   "/wp-content/uploads/design-name-125×125.jpg"
5. You will need to create another custom field called "full-image" and enter the location of the full-size image in that field.
6. You may also enter custom fields for "web-url" and "designer" if you want to add additional information to each entry.

Setting Up Star Ratings

1. Install the WP-Post Ratings plugin from WordPress.org. Activate both the plugin and the widgets.
2. To switch the type of images to transparent .PNGs, open wp-content/plugins/wp-postratings/wp-postratings.php in a text editor and change the following lines (should be near the top of the document):

   ### Define Image Extension
   define('RATINGS_IMG_EXT', 'gif');
   //define('RATINGS_IMG_EXT', 'png');

   to match this:

   ### Define Image Extension
   //define('RATINGS_IMG_EXT', 'gif');
   define('RATINGS_IMG_EXT', 'png');

3. Then upload that file back into the plugins folder.
4. In your WordPress admin panel, click the Ratings > Options link on the left sidebar.
5. The transparent .PNG stars should be selected by default.
6. Under 'Ratings AJAX Style' change 'Show Loading Image With Text' to 'No' and 'Show Fading In And Fading Out Of Ratings' to 'No.'
7. Click 'Save Changes.'
8. Now click the 'Ratings Templates' on the left sidebar.
9. Replace the text in the 'Ratings Vote Text' box with the following code:

   %RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE%

10. Replace the text in the 'Ratings Voted Text' with the following code:

    %RATINGS_IMAGES%

11. Click the 'Save' button.
12. You should now see your star ratings show on the gallery single pages next to the title of the gallery item.

Adding Widgets to the Footer

1. Make sure you activated the WP-Post Ratings widgets when you activated the plugin.
2. In your WordPress Admin, click Widgets on the sidebar.
3. From the drop-down box under 'Current Widgets' select '1st Subsidiary Aside' and click 'Show.'
4. Drag the widgets you'd like to see shown in this area from left to right (Highest Rated, Most Rated, Recent Comments, etc.)
5. Click 'Save.'
6. You should now see your widgets in the footer.

Download the theme for free!

• large preview
• live demo
• download the theme (.zip, 1.1 Mb)

We express sincere gratitude to Christoper Wallace for his truly impressive work. Please let us know in the comments if this release meets your expectations. And if not, please let us know what we could improve in the upcoming releases!

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• DelliStore: A Free Professional CSS/XHTML/PSD-Template
• “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme
• Project Icon Set
• Flavours Icon Set
• Typography Keyboard Layout