Oh I spend too much time in front of my pc – my wife always say. This time around – I sat, designed and coded a straight how many hours and am glad to produce: Rotary. Rotary is a two column theme with tons of features including a kicker home page. It is built to be used with WordPress 3.0, and is centered around the idea of running your blog as a CMS. Let me explain:
Below is a screenshot of Rotary’s glorious homepage. The roundabout carousel sits right on the fold – with images that are pulled straight from your post thumbnails. Click to view the Rotary Demo page:
Custom Post Type
You like that carousel / slider in the home page? Well that is due to the amazing code known as the roundabout by Fred LeBlanc. You can easily change the contents of this carousel in two ways:
1) Using a custom post type
In the left hand side of the admin area you will notice a section called “Roundabouts”. Simply add a new roundabout and give it a title, some content and attach a “feature image”.
The images are automatically resized to the right dimensions. Also – you’re only allowed up to 5 roundabouts.
2) Change the static code
If you decide you don’t want to use the custom post type feature – you can simply change the HTML. Inside home.php you will see an unordered list with each item as follows:
1 | <li><a href="#"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/586x360.jpg" alt="Need Image Here" /></a><div class="hiddendesc">Need to Enter Image</div></li> |
Simply replace the values of your images, title and link and you’re set to go.
The Navigation Menu
This by far is my favorite 3.0 feature – custom menus. It’s simply amazing. I’ve added the code to Rotary that lets you design the main navigation of the theme.
Simply drag and drop items to the menu builder and save.
Feature Images
Just like the roundabout items – all posts in this theme can have its own feature image. Simply use the “Set feature Image” option for each post:
This image will show as thumbnails in the archive pages, and a medium photo inside the single page template:
Conclusion
Truly by using the features above – you can utilize the power of WordPress 3.0 as well as turn your blog into a cool CMS. Give Rotary a spin – it’s cool, it works and it’s only $10! Please leave your questions and comments below.
which comment system plugin you using for this ? :P
the default wp comments
Hi there!
Love the theme and cant wait to get into it.
However I try and activate and it keep coming up with activation failed….
Any tips on how to overcome this?
Cheers
Ok Michael, sorry for the premature post. As Murphy’s Law would have it I have somehow got it working!
Any solution for the white screen of death yet? I have created a website using this theme which btw is great and easy to use but cannot log in the admin anymore because it produces a white screen of a death. I remade the entire website and the same thing happened. I don’t want to have to do it a third time.
ive seen this happen but not with one of my themes. try this – access your db using phpmyadmin. look into the wp_options table, template field – and delete the value. this will reset back to twentyten theme.
thanks for that. It only seems to happen with your theme others have worked out. Thanks for the solution I was able to export the content now trying a different theme. Great design though I wish it could have worked for me
Hi,
I bought this theme yesterday for our company site but for some reason I can’t customize anything except the content. The web guy says there’s code embedded that won’t let me change anything. Help?
Hi, great template. I cleaned up the URL with /%postname%/ and it worked fine, but the roundabouts URL are something like http://www.sitename/roundabouts/postname…Is there a way to remove the roundabouts from the URL? I am only intermediate on WP, so sorry if this is a silly question. Thanks in advance for your reply!
-Gabe
it is needed for the custom post types.
Sorry a second post…Back on Sept18, someone asked about creating a page with all his blog posts; you answered with: “that can be achieved by creating a special template…” Can you elaborate more on this? For example, is this something easily done within this template? Or really I have to code a special page?
Thanks
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates
And last question, I promise…I would like to add left/right arrows or some type of indicator so people realize to scroll. I read through the info from the Roundabout website, but saw no mention of indicators. Besides adding them directly to the image, are there any other options?
Thanks again!
Hello, what is the trick for activating autorotate in roundabouts? I know it can be done (i’ve add some messy code – roundabouts autorotate, but layout is completly ruined). What is the dedicated (working and clean) code for autorotate in roundabout? Please help :)
VERY interested in the autorotate for the roundabout. This would be a VERY helpful feature. Love the theme!
Got the roundabout working with autorotate. Took a few times to get it going without throwing the whole layout off.
The only functionality that I couldn’t get to work properly was the title/continue link directly below the roundabout…so I removed it and will just make sure all the pertinent info is in the actual image in the roundabout.
If you’re up for it, try replacing the following bit in “home.php” :
//
With THIS :
var interval;
jQuery(‘#roundabout ul’).css(“visibility”,”visible”).roundabout({
minOpacity: 1,
minScale: 0.3,
//easing: ‘easeInBack’,
duration: 1500,
reflect: true,
startingChild: 0,
btnNext: ‘#nextRound’,
btnPrev: ‘#previousRound’
}).hover(function() {
clearInterval(interval);
},function() {
interval = startAutoPlay();
});
interval = startAutoPlay();
function startAutoPlay() {
return setInterval(function() {
jQuery(‘#roundabout ul’).roundabout_animateToNextChild();
}, 5000);
};
ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS save a copy of the older code so that you can fix it if you don’t like what happens. Made WAY too many mistakes like that in my time.
This theme is going to go live on my church’s site sometime in early August. Really looking forward to using it. Great theme.
Hah! The part to look for in “home.php” got left out somehow.
Look around line 43. Replace the 3rd with what’s written in the comment above. It’s the directly below this :
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/jquery.easing.1.3.js”>
Sorry for clogging up the comments.
Andy
Thank you Andy. Many people are looking for this functionality.
Something is not working when i try it. Did you changed the whole:
//
with your code? Or mayby just one line from this chunk of code?
Hey all…
Sorry about the way late reply. I’m guessing I didn’t click the “notify me of follow-up comments” bit.
I’m not a programmer – I know enough to break a lot of things…but was able to find some workarounds from other bits of code online.
As such – I can’t remember how I did this or what I changed – but it is working on my site (which is in maintenance mode right now pending a re-launch this week).
I’ve dropped the home.php file into a .txt file that you can take a look at. If you have any questions…you’re welcome to ask, but I can’t guarantee I’ll have any idea what you’re talking about ;)
Have a great day everyone!
http://www.andyfrew.ca/code/home.php.txt
Thank you for posting this Andy! I was able to get mine to autorotate by copying and pasting the code from the file you linked to.
I’d like to know that as well, the autorotate function!
look for Andy’s code (above)
This theme is one of the best on the market for business.
its look like no longer free :(
what feature ive got? fshare tshare? anything about social plugin?
Thanks so much for the awesome theme! Is there a way to change the little thumbnail images on the main page by “latest blog posts” at the bottom? What about the little images for “testimonials” and “About us”? Thanks!
the square thumbnails are from the post thumbnails. the rest – edit the html in home.php
Hi Michael
Love the theme, but can’t seem to get past the error below. I took a look at line 96, but can’t seem to find anything that looks like it doesn’t belong.
any ideas?
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at xxx/wp-content/themes/rotary/functions.php:96) in xxx/wp-login.php on line 353
Hi Rupie,
The cannot modify header information error is common to php – especially for unwanted blank spaces. try switching to another theme and going back to rotary.
Wow, this is a neat theme and that too for free :)
Thanks!
Trying to change the main web title font with TTFTitles plugin… can’t find the code where I need to do that, and also can’t find where to delete/change ‘just another wordpress site’
help?
Thanks
Also, trying to use the menu-builder but it’s not actually creating a drop-down menu