After many attempts at trying to get a fully functional magazine theme, I give you: Aparatus – my most complicated theme yet. Aparatus is as a premium WordPress theme that comes with a Mootools slideshow in the home page. You may also notice that I misspelled Aparatus (which I can lie and say was purely intentional) but honestly – did not know until the little red line in this HTML editor showed up underneath and I said to myself “WTF! If I change the spelling – think of all the places in the code I have to change!”.

View the Demo
UPDATE: For those who are having issues with plugins, as well as unexpected errors when upgrading to WP 3.0, try inserting the following code inside “footer.php” – just before the closing “body” tag:

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<div><?php wp_footer(); ?></div>

So much for a name change. Nonetheless, Aparatus is packed with features and design delight that aims to tickle your innermost web mag fancy. I have included extensive theme options that will leave you not needing to touch a single line of HTML. I have cufonized fonts for the headings and the site logos – that you need not create your own. I have modified the WordPress loop so much that it covered almost all possible looping scenario. Last of all, Aparatus comes with four different stylesheets targeted to suit your color schema.

Updated Twitter Badges!

I received enough comments on the Twitter badge to say “Follow ON Twitter” as supposed to “Follow IN Twitter“. So here they are:

Simply replace the existing badge image in the Theme’s images folder.

The Slide Show

As for many magazine styled websites – a slideshow is a must have. Thanks to JonDesign’s Smooth Gallery – which made this possible. The slideshow by default pulls your five latest posts. The loop then continues to present the remaining of your posts directly below. The theme options allow total exclusion of the slideshow, as well as automatic slide. You can also specify a specific category to be pulled into the slideshow – without ever duplicating the posts in the bottom. All while the default loop logic is still acknowledged and functional. What this means is that – the loop still recognizes the options you enter in WordPress admin – not just in the theme (i.e. number of posts to show, etc); in addition, the paging system (next page etc) still works and automatically hides the slideshow in the inner pages. Oh, I also re-styled the WP-Navi Plugin (the right way), by de registering it’s default stylesheet.

WP 2.9 Thumbnail Ready!

The images in the slideshow as well as the thumbnails per post can be set by using the new “set as thumbnail” feature in WP 2.9!. This supersedes the old school way of inserting “custom-fields” – but will still work with either! You can use the thumbnail feature or custom fields set to “image”.

Ads, Twitter, Widgets and Everything else

The sidebar comes with advertising blocks which you can set up in the theme options panel. When you enter your Twitter account in the options, this will dictate the @replies in the Tweet Me buttons, the big “Follow my Updates” in the header, as well as the last tweet in the sidebar. The popular posts and recent comments tabbed area are all non-plugin driven – which means the code is all inclusive with the theme, without needing to install a plugin. Lastly, the sidebar supports widgets, the comments are threaded, gravatar – ready, as well as suckerfished drop down menus for the categories in the header.



That’s Enough! Download Already!

To view a live preview of Aparatus – click here. You can download the theme from this link. If you like the theme – you can do one of many things to keep me happy: Follow me in Twitter, Donate some coffee money, Tweet about it, subscribe to my feeds or even just leave a nice comment below.

View the Demo
UPDATE: For those who are having issues with plugins, as well as unexpected errors when upgrading to WP 3.0, try inserting the following code inside “footer.php” – just before the closing “body” tag:

1

<div><?php wp_footer(); ?></div>