Wordpress theme: Atlantis

I don't know how many of you use Wordpress, but I just released my first theme for it and wanted to share it here. I've used Wordpress for a long time now, but didn't build a theme from the ground up until I made Atlantis back in May of this year. I got a lot of requests to release it from people looking for a bold dark theme, so I turned some of my hacks into real options, and once I had moved my site onto my next theme (because I do want my site to be unique) I decided to release Atlantis.

Depending on how familiar you are with Wordpress themes, you may quickly notice that this has a few more options than most basic themes: the multiple color schemes (six included -- you can set any color scheme for any page on your site via custom post fields), the easy way you can specify which of your pages appear in the top nav bar (again by using a custom field in your post) or bottom nav area, the customized (tamed) page navigation, and the easy CSS overrides to further customize a page (again via custom post fields). I put a lot of effort into making this appealing and easily customizable for many people without touching the code. There's also a Recently Updated Pages function that inserts a nice subtle announcement on the home page when one or more of your pages have been updated within a specific timeframe (defaults to 1 week; can be changed or turned off).

If you're not into dark themes then this may not be your thing, but if you are then you may like it. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it so far (not to mention months of "please release your theme!"). Please check the README file for lots more information about how exactly to use the different features.

Screenshot and download: http://rogersmj.com/design/wordpress/atlantis

If you find any problems, please just contact me via my site or post them here. Again, this is the very first thing I've ever released for Wordpress, and I tried to make sure I had everything right but if I missed something please let me know. Enjoy!

dpaanlka said:

The screen shot doesn't seem to display right for me. Can't you make it just a normal image? Notice that I'm scrolled all the way to the top, but I cannot see the top of the screen shot!

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Sorry about that! I use an iBox script for fancy image loading, and I guess it doesn't work well at low res. I'll have to look into that. I added a link below the screenshot to pull the image up normally.

xUKHCx said:

I quite like it, looks cool. Dont know what wordpress is but i like looking a pictures.

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Wordpress is, at its core, a very nice system for blogging. It's PHP/MySQL so it will run on just about any web server, and has tons of plugins and themes so people can customize it to do just about whatever they want. It makes publishing things to your web site very easy.

UPDATE: Added a live preview so you can view the theme in action directly on my site. Also fixed a minor problem with sidebar text color; updated to version 1.01.

Well, first I sketch out my ideas in a graphics program (I use Fireworks -- the best tool for web layouts). This allows you to quickly change colors, positions, etc, without doing any code, and immediately see what you have.

Once I have something I like, I code the XHTML/CSS for it into a static page. In other words, I make an exact replica of my sketch but this time using code. This is the stage where you "slice" out the images you need from your mockup (like for backgrounds and stuff).

Once you have a sample page (or two), the real fun begins. This is where you start inserting it into your Wordpress theme files. Basically I keep my XHTML/CSS demo code open and then pull up the skeleton files for another Wordpress theme (like the default one, or one I've made before), paste my XHTML in the appropriate spot, move all the function calls (like for getting titles, posts, stuff like that) into the appropriate spots in my code, and then delete the original theme's XHTML. Of course you have to put all the CSS you made into the style.css file for that theme. Then I start tweaking the Wordpress function calls to get exactly what I want.

I suggest you go read up more on the anatomy of a Wordpress theme. There's a number of articles out there; check them out so you understand exactly what all the files mean and what "The Loop" is.