Free Podcasting, Video and Photography WordPress Theme
(Update: 15/11/2009): the theme was updated.
In this post we are glad to release Smashing Multimedia, a unique, flexible and advanced WordPress theme for artists, photographers, podcasters, designers and users. The theme was designed by Sarah Neuber especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
Download the theme for free!
Smashing Multimedia was designed especially for podcasters, photographers and users who can now easily embed videos and images, rate them and showcase them in their own WordPress-based blog. It has a parent theme and an easily customizable child theme. This WordPress Theme comes with layered PSD source files, a visual help guide and is fully localized ready for you to translate it into your target language.
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this post if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.
- demo
- large preview (.jpg)
- installation guide and documentation (.zip)
- download the theme (.zip, 2 Mb)
- download the PSD-source (.zip)
Requirements
- The GD library due to the custom written resizing script for the
splash images. - PHP 5
- PHP Allow URL fopen: ON
Features
- Easy media embed method, with shortcodes in the post content area or use a media plugin of your choice (supported are YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video, Blip.tv, Veoh, Viddler and Revver),
- Feature any post, any category – the easy way – just make them sticky! Why restrict yourself to one featured category when you can have the freedom to pick and choose any post from any category to feature!
- Choose and put together your Site’s Main Navigation without touching the code in the template files. All available options are right there for you included in the Theme Options.
- Choose and put together your Site’s Category Navigation (appears in sidebar) without touching the code in the template files. Again, all available options are right there for you included in the Theme Options.
- Choose the type of splash image for your media posts: sliding or static splash image. Do the same indepently for Category pages.
- Choose the type of post teaser (the usual excerpt or text from the content) to appear on multible post pages and customize it’s word limit through theme options. The word limit can be adjusted independently for sticky (featured) posts or multimedia posts on the front page and on category pages.
- Subpages appear dynamically in sidebar when created
- Related posts: if there are any, appear in the single page sidebar. How many should appear is set by you from the theme options
- 8 Independent widget areas: front page seperator (1) just below the featured area, front page (1 – index), category(1), archive (1 – daily, monthly, yearly, author and tag archives share the same widgets), single (1), page (1), search (1), 404 (1).
- Security: 2 common sense security precautions already hooked in just for you; hidden login page error feedback and hidden WordPress version number,
- Preventing Spam: a useful little function to deny Comment Posting to No Referrer Requests
- Extra goodies: cformsII styles, wp-Pagenavi, wp-PostRatings, WP125: Easy 125×125 Ad Management For WordPress styles included, show your last tweet (shows on the front page and can be removed and replaced by any plugin of your choice so in other words you are not stuck with it if you don’t like it), Social share media, Feedburner Rss and Email, Follow on Twitter, “Give it a Tweet” call to action to your readers, styles for threaded comments (if enabled), seperated comments and trackbacks (appear in animated dropdown), styled admin comments, custom avatar image for when your users don’t have their own!
- …and even more features! (pdf)
Further screenshots
The slide show navigation at the top of the theme in the Multimedia WordPress Theme.
Category view in the Multimedia WordPress Theme.
The sidebar in the Multimedia WordPress Theme.
Update (24/08/2009)
The problem with the js is fixed. It was the missing call to the wp_footer(); also, removed the js file that was not needed. Please make sure when you import the sample data that you check the “Download Attachments” when importing!
Everyone has their own opinion of what constitues a decent free WordPress Theme which I appreciate.
In view of that, you may not be particularly excited about the colour, font or other design choices ( including spelling ;) ) and you may decide, as some of you have already done so, to express this in your comments below.
While you do so, it is my sincere wish that some of you may take a moment and appreciate the effort that went into things like: the Theme Options, the custom write panels, the custom video shortcodes, that if I may add output valid html code, and the time taken to write and comment out, what I believe is, decent html/css code.”
Thank you very much, Sarah! We really appreciate your efforts.
Ruben
December 17th, 2009 2:15 amThis theme is free! Wow! Incredible. This is really incredible Sarah! Hat’s off to you! I’ve looked through your other themes at themeforest and I must say you are one of the best website designers out there.
Keep up the AWESOME work
يوتيوب اسلامي
December 22nd, 2009 5:41 pmThanks for your help, thanks a lot
يوتيوب
اسلامي
JOHN
January 2nd, 2010 11:53 amReceived the following errors on install:
Warning: fopen(…/wp-content/themes/Theme Files/style.css) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in …/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3580
Warning: fread(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in …/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3583
Warning: fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in …/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3586
Verified fopen on and PHP 5 in use.
Philipe
January 7th, 2010 1:55 pmHi… In tvacarau.com.br not listing thumbs. The embed works, but the videos do not appear in the thumb. What should I do?
Susan
January 15th, 2010 7:43 pmHi Sarah,
I’ve been searching and searching for a video blogging template. Yours is absolutely gorgeous. But I cannot make it work right. If I purchase the Theme Forest version, would you be able to troubleshoot the problem? How much would you charge to teach me how to work with it (maybe on Skype or something)? It’s perfect for the new site I’m creating. And I’d want the light version. I really hope you will consider teaching me how to use it. It’s just fantastic! Thanks, Susan
Sabrina
February 25th, 2010 8:20 amI’m experiencing the same problem as John noted above.
Tara
February 25th, 2010 11:42 amExtremely buggy theme. I checked that it wasn’t my install of WordPress by activating other themes and this one definitely is the worst I have ever installed.
I got the same errors as John and Sabrina. I then made sure the uploads folder was set to 777 and got a bunch of new errors.
I went step by step through the help file 3 times and kept getting massive errors. It’s too bad b/c I like the look of it.
Kristin
February 25th, 2010 11:45 amI have spent so many hours just trying to get this to work. Can anyone please help me with a detailed description of how to make the images show up on the homepage. All images get this …
“Unable to open ‘wp-content/uploads/image-183//IMG_3616.jpg’ for writing: No such file or directory in /home2/onelivi1/public_html/wp-content/themes/smashingMultiMedia/functions.php on line 569″
Steinar
March 12th, 2010 6:49 pmI am having the same problem as Kristin. No media will display in the front page. All I get are little error messages like this one:
Warning: imagejpeg() [
function.imagejpeg
]: Unable to open ‘wp-content/uploads/image-442//The-Inland-Sea-label.png’ for writing: No such file or directory in /home/theinlan/public_html/wp-content/themes/smashingMultiMedia/functions.php on line 569
How do I rectify this? Can anyone help, please?
Cheers
JB
March 16th, 2010 12:38 pmDid anyone ever get an answer on the lack of media being able to display on the front page all Steinar and Kristin above? Please advise. Dame issue for me…
JB
March 16th, 2010 1:43 pmDid anyone ever get an answer on the lack of media being able to display on the front page all Steinar and Kristin above? Please advise. Same issue for me…it won’t upload my jpeg onto the front page for thumbnails, etc.
teorico
March 25th, 2010 12:10 pmvery nice, thanks
kang dadang
March 31st, 2010 6:26 amgreat themes, and it’s free iam enjoyed it.
Glenn Thomas
April 5th, 2010 6:31 amThis is a brilliant theme. Many thanks.
One question, I’m trying to tweak the stylesheet to remove the share icons on the homepage and make the featured video bigger. I have managed to remove the share icons, but can’t work out how to make the video bigger. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Glenn
A.
April 12th, 2010 1:23 amThanks to both Sarah and Smashing Magazine for putting this up—I was looking for a free WordPress template for a video blog and this was perfect as a starting point. Had to iron out a few bugs on my server side (the php.ini file) and I had a bit of problem with the Twitter widget but once I fixed the config and removed the widget all was working fine!
You can see it in action here: chugger.tv
Again, thanks a lot for this.
João Camacho
May 3rd, 2010 11:19 amDoesn’t work at all!
GardenTechs
May 20th, 2010 9:32 pmFirst of all we’d like to thank Sarah Neuber and Smashing Magazine for putting out such a wonderful theme FOR FREE.
We are proof that this theme totally works!! Check the site here:
http://www.youtubegarden.com/
We are not going to say it is easy to install. It is tedious but doable.
This isn’t for the faint hearted. If your WordPress knowledge level is novice, do not attempt this. Most of the comments here doesn’t even involve the theme itself but basic WordPress stuff one should already know how to troubleshoot. USE GOOGLE SEARCH TO LOOK FOR ANSWERS to WordPress errors (any unable to open, warnings, functions are all wordpress issues not the theme). It is not fair to blame it on the theme because we have not even encountered any of those issues. There must be a step you’re missing.
We were close to giving up ourselves, we worked on our template for hours just to get it to where it is now, we read the PDF instructions again and again. And read all the helpful comments on this page. We suggest you guys do the same before you complain. :-) Beggars can’t be choosers. Free is
Free, we have to make do the best we can.
>> @doctaco you are brilliant!! This is the only really big theme issue we’ve encountered. There are two lines of scripts on the footer that is absolutely necessary- to make the sticky videos move from one video to another and for the images to have that amazing slide effect on the image post on the frontpage. If you don’t have that, the frontpage won’t work.
Go to our site: right click on our mainpage and VIEW SOURCE. Go to the bottom and look for the scripts: jquery and copy the entire thing. place it on your footer where we placed it. Don’t forget to change the URL to point to your site.
>> COMPARE YOUR SOURCE Codes with ours, must be close or similar. we have added a lot of plugins. Make sure you have them if you copy from our codes.
If you know how to use FIREBUG, even better- it’s a cheat sheet for codes on Firefox. You can view a website’s source codes from there and copy it.
>> Make sure you install all the plugins Sarah recommended even if you don’t need it, just install it and deactivate later. WE want to make sure we follow every instruction on the PDF before we tweak the site. Once you got it working then you can decide which ones to keep or deactivate. WE don’t want the ratings plugin for example, we still installed it but deactivated it later once everything’s fine.
@JB, Steinar and Kristin, this might help: Make sure your uploads folder have 777 permissions; make sure that folders: image-120, image-183, image-291 and so forth have 777 permissions too. The images will not show if you won’t do it. click on the folders, do you actually see images on the folders? it should contain images…
Sorry this is long but hope it helps others. This theme isn’t buggy at all. We downloaded the file this week and did about 5 hours work including our content. Today is May 21, 2010 and we got a working theme to prove it works. Please check what we did with the theme.
We added a lot of plugins and are even using the 3.0-beta2 version and works great!
Thank you again Sarah for your hard work!!
Chetz Yusof
June 1st, 2010 6:12 pm@GardenTechs,
Thanks for your tips. How do you make the post sticky? I tried change the date to latest and it appeared in the Featured Area. But how can we keep it there even when we have a new latest post?
Thanks so much!
Chetz Yusof
Futurman
May 25th, 2010 10:42 pmI really love it，great job
Jack
May 28th, 2010 3:58 amHi,
Thanks for such wonderful theme.
I got a problem. I want to use video from the site which is not supported by your short code.
How do I use the video from such sites.
I can add the mbed code from this video site into post and it works on post page. However it will obviously not show up on the home page in featured cagoery.
I’m using an image which shows up in the featured video area instead of video, but this is not the solution.
Any help would be appreciated.
Ryan
July 8th, 2010 11:19 pmDid you ever get this working? I want to us a plugin like WordTube or something to how my own videos.
keif
June 2nd, 2010 10:11 amI ran into an issue where it wasn’t showing the stickied posts, and it turns out because it was ALSO grabbing “trashed” sticky posts.
I couldn’t find any “official” way to grab ONLY sticky posts that were published, so I wrote this ugly code:
$showPosts = get_option(‘wps_sticky_showposts’);
$sticky_posts = get_option( ‘sticky_posts’ );
$publishedPosts = get_posts();
for ($i=0, $len = count($publishedPosts); $i ID;
}
foreach ($sticky_posts as $sticky_post)
{
if (in_array($sticky_post, $publishedPostIds))
{
$sticky[] = $sticky_post;
}
}
$sticky = array_slice( $sticky, 0, $showPosts );
$stickyArgs = array(
‘post__in’ => $sticky,
‘caller_get_posts’ => 1,
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘showposts’ => $showPosts
);
It did the job, it’s ugly, and I don’t feel like cleaning it up :-) but when you need “published” posts, it works, until I find a cleaner method.
Chetz Yusof
June 3rd, 2010 9:17 amYay! I managed to make it work. Thanks Sarah & Smashing Magazine!
This theme works, you need to follow the instructions carefully. Here’s the proof…
http://pawbulousfitness.chetzyusof.com
:)
Chetz Yusof
Ipads bag
June 21st, 2010 10:39 pmSmashing Multimedia was designed especially for podcasters, photographers and users who can now easily embed videos and images, rate them and showcase them in their own WordPress-based blog. It has a parent theme and an easily customizable child theme. This WordPress Theme comes with layered PSD source files, a visual help guide and is fully localized ready for you to translate it into your target language.
ipad bag
Riley
July 4th, 2010 4:37 pmThis is an awesome WordPress theme! I put off downloading and installing this theme because it seemed really intense but I finally did it and it only took about 20 minutes for everything. It’s awesome! If you want to see it in action, check out randomriley.com
180
July 27th, 2010 9:28 amHi
Does anyone know how to get the twitter bird link to go directly to my twitter page without redirecting to a twitter login page?
Also the latest tweet is spelling out “'” wherever there is an apostrophe.
Lastly how to I add a “Home” page link that simply redirects back to the home page?
Thanks for the help!! :) :) :)
2kilobyte.org
August 12th, 2010 1:20 pmlookin so goooooood!
i hope its working good too!
thanks
Gaeso Admin
August 22nd, 2010 5:37 pmVery nice theme indeed. Thank you.
Admin @ GAESO.ORG
bu
September 7th, 2010 7:36 pmhow do you use the multimedia shortcuts? i am not able to upload videos to my home page feature area?could somebody please help?
pimapen
September 13th, 2010 11:15 amooks superb. Thanks.
Gregory Pike
September 15th, 2010 10:05 amI have this theme uploaded to my themes directory but it is not showing in the WordPress themes management tool. Does it work with 3.0?
Or did I forget to do something really stupid?
Gregory Pike
September 17th, 2010 4:37 amSo I was connected to the wrong server where my site used to be hosted… Silly.
mOOven
September 29th, 2010 8:08 amthanks for this theme. I’ll remove my current theme and change with Free Posdcasting theme into my site mooven.info. I really thanks for this theme
9ale7
December 15th, 2010 12:42 amlooks amazing :P
kevin
December 26th, 2010 4:42 pmAnyone know how to get this to work with the new Vimeo embed code for HTML5 without some serious mods? I don’t want to make all my own images. I like how it works now, but would like it to work with iPhones and iPads.
Thanks!
hadi
January 5th, 2011 8:12 amhi my frind
tanks , very tnks
Steph
January 16th, 2011 3:26 pmThe theme crashes WordPress 3.0 upon activation
Andrej
January 19th, 2011 5:02 pmEverything works just fine with just a little tweaking – most of users asking for help are having problems with some sort of permission errors.
You MUST create following folders inside /wp-content/uploads/
“image-120″, “image-183″, “image-291″, “image-442″, “image-80″
and chmod them to 777!
Next thing is about pagenavi and issue that page navigation along posts on front page is not working with this theme. You simply copy everything from category.php to new file home.php. Upload home.php which is now identical to category.php and you shoud see working page navigation.
Good luck.
Brad Dalton
February 23rd, 2011 12:44 amLooks ok but hard to customise if your not a designer. A premium WP video theme would be alot easier to custimise
Leon Prof
February 28th, 2011 12:35 pmWhen i upload an image inside a post it is not shown on the sticky area, i only get this “Oops! No Media File was found.
Make sure you upload a Media Splash Image for this post!”
Allthough the image is shown normally in the Post area with the slide effect working correctly.
When i upload a video (using shortcode etc from utube) it shown correctly in the sticky area.
Any help plz?
Vitaly Friedman
March 10th, 2011 2:36 amUnfortunately, the theme has been released almost two years ago, so it’s not compatible with WordPress 3.0. We are very sorry about that.
Jon Shelton
March 9th, 2011 8:50 amHi,
New to all this word press stuff but got the theme and uploaded it put having problems with the features home page and posts. This appears every where?
Warning: getimagesize(wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DSCF4273-269×360.jpg) [function.getimagesize]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/jshelton/public_html/wp-content/themes/smashingMultiMedia/functions.php on line 500
Haven’t a clue what the problem is can any one help?
Website is
http://colourfreestyle.com/
häns
March 10th, 2011 2:07 amlike that theme but have two problems:
1: on category page the word limit for the sliding post doesn’t work. don’t know where to set the limit.
2: i want to show more posts on the category page. (don’t want to flip after 10 postes)
can anyone help me?
Ryan
March 14th, 2011 10:00 pmCan this template use Lightboxes?
Tod Norn
March 18th, 2011 4:40 amFresh aggregation of templates ! The last is good and I will load now in my latest wordpress website without css modification.
Ethyl Kielich
March 18th, 2011 6:11 amGroovy series of templates ! The latest is beautiful and I will employ now in my latest wordpress site without css change.
Francisco
March 22nd, 2011 8:01 amHI! I´m a Spanish person, and I want to translate the theme into spanish. Where is the .po file? or do you recomend me another way to translate the theme?
Thank you very much, keep in contact with me through this email. Bye
vu
May 15th, 2011 1:06 amGreat thank!
I love it so much!
Mario
May 17th, 2011 1:56 pmHi,
in the Theme options “Media Posts (non-featured) on Front page – Number of posts to show” i use 6 post… well, but was is with my other blog postings ???
I miss a MORE or page 1, 2 , 3 buttons…
Who can help ? Thanks. Mario
PLEASE EMAIL DIRECT TO ME !!!!
******************************************
mario@smart-mail.de
SH
May 25th, 2011 2:03 pmShame its not compatible with later versions.
Rajlaxmi Sharma
June 8th, 2011 7:29 pmGreat !!!Great !!!Great Theme I had ever seen before…
Good Efforts
Me
June 21st, 2011 1:42 amCool, but one problem on this theme is there is no older/previous post button :-(?
Is there anyone already fixed this issue?
me2
June 25th, 2011 2:17 pmany chance that this will be updated to the latest wordpress?
nick
July 1st, 2011 9:51 amI would like to limit the “Featured posts” on the home page to a certain category or to certain post, Tried the sticky only ones but it is still showing others… any help on coding or where to input this option would be awesome!
thanks
Jason King
July 6th, 2011 4:31 amThis theme looks good, but it’s showing its age. I’ve used this theme at http://www.frightly.com and am happy with the result, but only after a few hours of customiation.
The theme didn’t support Featured Images, it was doing it the old-fashioned way with custom fields. So I enabled Featured Images and replaced the sliding preview images with them.
It was easy to remove the background and button images and replace them with my own choice.
Getting auto-embedded videos to display in the area at the top of the home page took several attempts, you have to edit a fair bit of PHP to do this.
Worth the effort.
shailendra
July 15th, 2011 4:40 amCould please explain how to get auto-embedded videos to display in the area at the top of the home page.
i am using it with wordpress3.2 ..it doesn’t seems to work.
Jason King
July 16th, 2011 11:41 amIf anyone wants to know how to modernise this theme, I can supply some PHP. The main changes I made were to these files:
1) themes/smashingMultiMedia/featuredArea/featuredStickyPosts.php
Added the_post_thumbnail to insert Featured Images.
Removed the code that displays a custom fields for video URL. Then added the_content(”) to display the posts’s content (and in the post, I paste the URL to YouTube or Vimeo).
2) themes/smashingMultiMedia/posts/indexPostColumns.php
Added offset=3 to the query to prevent posts showing up twice on the home page.
3) themes/smashingMultiMedia/functions.php
Added the standard code to enable Featured Images.
4) themes/smashingMultiMediaBrown/style.css
A bit of styling was necessary to keep the vertical icons lined up with the video.
5) Also had to change a few settings in the dashboard (such as Image and Media file sizes). And added Featured Images to posts.
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.2 and it’s still working ok.
Shailendra
July 25th, 2011 4:17 amThanks you very much ……will give it a try and update u …asap .
Alexandra
September 15th, 2011 6:44 pmHi everyone I hope someone can help me with this. I’ve installed this theme on xampp, and everything is working except the rollovers and links for the sticky posts, and the sliding images. I’ve read and reread all the info here, and can see on my page source that the required jquery scripts are being called to the right files. I don’t know where to go from here as it all looks correct.
Would greatly appreciate help from people who have had success with the theme. Thank you Sara for creating a really great theme, I can’t wait to see it working properly for my site.
Javier
December 8th, 2011 2:54 amThanks for info. can you send me to email changes?
info ____ aisa-llavaneres.com
alok dixit
August 2nd, 2011 1:24 amhow can upload player and which plugins are used
himanshu
August 11th, 2011 5:37 amtell me use video in this theme
Noob
September 8th, 2011 5:13 pmAwesome template if I had a CLUE how to use it. LOL
Aidan Doyle
January 27th, 2012 3:56 pmI am big fan of your theme, but when I try to upload to my WordPress account, I get error
“The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet”
Can you please as i really don’t want to use another theme.! Your’s is the one!.
Thanks and keep up the good work!