The Homepage

Squid Work’s homepage sports a beautiful slider of your latest posts. Code credits go to Nivo Slider for the awesome transition effects of the images. Right below the slider are 6 additional thumbnails of your selected posts.

How to select a category for the slider and posts underneath it:

You can specify a post category for the slider as well as the 6 thumbnails right below it. All you need to do is open feature.php in the editor section in the admin panel (go to “Appearance” -> “editor”, and select “feature.php” in the right hand column). Once you have “feature.php” in editor – look for this code: “$cat_for_slideshow = ”” enter the category slug inside the quotes. Do the same for the posts underneath – but look for “$cat_for_six_boxes = ”” instead.

The Sidebar

Squid Work’s sidebar floats in the middle of the viewport – thanks to the jQuery plugin: stickyFloat. Note that if your sidebar is longer than the viewport – it won’t float as expected. I added a custom flickr photo feed – thanks to code by Barattalo. This feed can be configured by adding your own flickr group id inside functions.php. Lastly, the sidebar supports widgets. Widgets will show up right above the Flickr feed.

Everything Else

Notice the beautiful bokeh photography by gemedj89 of Photodune. The container of the site is a combination of CSS 3 and textured repeating patterns. Fonts are supplied by Google Web Fonts and finally – all code is XHTML valid. How about that!

So what are you waiting for! Grab Squid Work and use for your WordPress blog. Make sure you follow me in twitter or facebook. Enjoy!

This functions like the straight out of the box default theme by Kubrick. Well – except for the widgets. I purposely disabled widgets because I feel that if you are to add something to the theme – it’s best to write it in the templates themselves. In other words, the Clam Shell is for bloggers, who have some theme coding and Photoshop abilities.

Why Clams?

I really don’t know. In my mock up – I needed something for the logo section, typed C-L-A-M by accident, and just went through with it. It was one of those moments that I was in a “design” roll that I was afraid to pause – so the name carried on. Why the clam shells all over? See, my original plan was to make the theme look good, but kind of splatter shells all over – that you would need the .psd file to customize. That’s when a light bulb switched in my head “I’ll give the theme for free…but sell the PSD!“. But Themeforest.net rejected my entry – because it wasn’t “high quality” enough – so there goes that plan. Note that I am giving the .psd files away as well – but only when you leave a comment. This is because it’s too large that I don’t want it eating my bandwidth.

Some Features

I started out with the 960.gs CSS framework but stopped halfway through. The reason is – the mockup may have been 960 pixels, but the columns in span irregularly. So its a perfect 960 pixels, but columns within are not based on the grid. I added large twitter, rss and contact icons in the header – which I think is a little different. Static content in the sidebar – with icons from the Practika collection by Smashing Magazine. Stock photos are from the amazing stock.xchng , while fonts are traditional Arial and Georgia all around.

I hand coded the sociable buttons in the single post template. I feel that this is best since no plug in is required for it to run. The icons are from Best Free Icons – the Aquaticus set.

Time for a Demo?

That’s right – I even set up a demo website. You can try out The Clam Shell from this link. Download the theme from here. All I ask in return is to follow me in Twitter. As mentioned – I will provide the original photoshop files so you can take those nasty clams out of there. If you need additional customization hints – contact me.

Update – Download the PSD files from here!