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!”.
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 purchase the theme for $10 through Paypal.
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Michael,
I just uploaded your theme but cannot figure out how to show the images on the opening page. Ideas?
@Noah – you can either add a post “feature image” or create a custom field: set the “key” to “image” and “value” to the absolute url of the image.
Okay. Thanks. I figured out the images, but my tweet bird will not post my current tweets. The twitter badge works when clicking on it, but my bird won’t tweet. Any help would be great. thanks.
This is a great theme and I have been playing around, mostly translating it to french to adapt it for my website.
I have a couple of problems though:
1- Like many people, the images in the slider do not show. I have setup the images using the image key with the image path and it’s still a no go. I’m using IE8 and when I go to my website, I see a black box with a line that actually shows that the image is currently loading…except it stays that way. Everything is setup properly with my host (both GD and timthumb), so I’m not quite sure what to do from here.
2- How do I change the character set so that the accents on letters will show? (é, à, è, etc…)
3- How can I reduce the font size for the name of my website? I know my name is long, but I’d like to fit it all in there…unless I change for a banner…I tried looking in header.php but I couldn’t find anything there…
Thanks for helping out!
@Steff
1) try adding more posts with images. also, make sure the cache folder for timthumb is writable. lastly – i was inspecting your page – the path is not resolving right. ck the key and value once again.
2) the theme is using cufon which uses the font league gothic. im not sure if it can support other chars. maybe take cufon out
3) in the css file – look for a#logo – reduce the font size property
I’ll try posting a couple new articles with images to see if it works out.
Just curious though, do the images need to be in a specific folder in order to display properly? I have a folder on my website in which I put all my pictures and the link to it in the custom field for the post is correct. Does it have to be in the images folder of the theme or any folder is ok?
I also figured out how to change the font size. As for the characters, it’s weird because the posts will accept the accents, but it’s just the theme itself and the css that won’t accept them.
Thanks for the help, let me know about the picture folder.
@Steff, all images need to be local to your server in order to resize by the script.
Michael: Love the look of this theme! Page links look great but struggling with posts from the category menu pages. I get the “Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in…on line 297″. I tried putting the suggested code into footer.php but still don’t see the footer or the right hand column. Reinstalled theme but didn’t fix the error. Using 3.0. Thanks in advance for any help.
i thought i fixed that error. let me look into it.
I LOVE this theme. Great, great work. :) People like you keep the world going!