I have updated this theme so there is now a WordPress backend theme options section to set which side the sidebar appears on, left or right. This update, 1.1.4, also fixes an oversight in the post titles, they now truncate when the title spills out of the title box.

Visit the theme release page for the download link at the bottom: Reclamation WordPress Theme

Of course, as you may imagine, this is a blue theme as you can see from the screenshot below:

Screenshot for Expression Blue

You can grab a copy of this theme from the theme release page: Expression Blue WordPress Theme

It is a simple theme though, not a really complex one, but could be modified to have a different background if you wanted to work with it (you’d need to alter the content/sidebar backgrounds too). Visit the theme release page for the download link: Drive WordPress Theme, now at release version 1.1.0

It is a theme that makes extensive use of jquery; for example making the post section collapsible, and the menu sections along the bottom of the screen. To take a look at the screenshots, see the theme release page: Natural Green WordPress Theme. To see the theme in action see my personal blog.

It has a large backend section for choosing what menu options you want, i.e., menu, categories, archives and so on, what bits you want collapsible, whether they should start collapsed etc.,

This has been fully tested and built on WordPress 2.7, but as it coincided with the release of WordPress 2.8 I tested it on that too and it’s fine.

So now you can choose a two column layout with left or right sidebar, or a three column layout with two left sidebars and content, two right sidebars and content or sidebars on either side of the content.

Aside from the layout addition, there are a couple of small alterations. The keywords have been altered for SEO purposes, adding the tags as keywords rather than having a set of pre-determined keywords. The wp_generator is removed from the header.

Take a look at the theme release page (OpenAir WordPress Theme) for the download.

Unlike the WordPress Theme, the BBPress Theme is not a ‘premium’ content theme, and is offered for free. It is a three column theme but because of the slight limitations of BBPress, doesn’t have an admin backend and so can’t be configured as easily or widely as the WordPress Theme.

Nevertheless it’s a nice solid theme and is easy to use. The normal procedures apply when downloading and installing it. Try for yourself and grab it from the release page: Ikon BBPress Theme.

Here is how you do it:

<div class=”post-recent-comment”>
<?php
 $comment_array = array_reverse(get_approved_comments($wp_query->post->ID));
 $count = 1;
?>

<?php if ($comment_array) { ?>
 <span class=”comment”><?php comments_number(’No comment’,'1 comment’,'% comments’); ?></span> – Latest by:
  <ul class=”commentlist”>
 <?php foreach($comment_array as $comment){ ?>
  <?php if ($count++ <= 2) { ?>
   <li>&lt?php comment_author_link(); ?><br /><?php comment_excerpt(); ?></li>
  <?php } ?>
 <?php } ?>
  </ul>
<?php } else { ?>
 <span class="comment">No comments so far</span>
<?php } ?>
</div>

Update: This piece of code has been fully implemented in a new theme I created, you can see the screenshots and read about it on the theme release page: Natural Green WordPress Theme. You can visit a working copy of this, in the wild so to speak, on my personal blog.

This could be useful for targetting certain users, admin for example.

Generally with WordPress templates you have index.php for the homepage, and single.php for each individual post. Some themes, including mine, separate this even further and have another template post.php included from the single.php template.

Regardless of whether further templates are used, the layout tends to be like this:

<div class=”post”>
 <div class=”post-title”><h2>Title</h2></div>
 <div class=”post-content”>Content Here</div>
 <div class=”post-bottom”>Posted by …</div>
</div>

With the introduction of WP-2.7 (Strayhorn), the new function post_class() was added, a very useful function. So this part…

<div class=”post”>

…now becomes…

<div <?php post_class(); ?>>

The post_class() function adds in all the necessary classes for each post, such as the category (if you post in the all category, the post_class() function adds the category-all class to the post div).

To modify this to add the name of the article’s author as a class to the div holding the post, you add in this bit of code and modify the post_class() as follows:

<?php $curauth = get_userdata(intval($post->post_author)); ?>

<div <?php post_class($curauth->user_login) ?>>

So that is very straightforward and from that point onwards the theme can customise posts for known/given users, such as admin, this might be useful on multi-author blogs.

It used to have a separate php file for configuration values. I have moved all of these into the functions.php file so they show up in the WordPress administrative backend in the News Print Options as you can see from the image.

In the options page there is a visual representation of the display of the featured posts, and the columns (two or three) with the sidebar. This helps the blogger get the right display and layout, suited to their desires.

There are options to select how the posts should appear in the column, what categories should be assigned to the columns, how many posts per column, whether the blog should have a ‘featured’ post, or a featured post icon.

It does however, reset itself when the new author page is opened up so the dropdown menu is selected on that user rather than using the default selected item.

Anyway, I created a proper page for it – Display User’s Posts WordPress Plugin – where you can also download the plugin from.