Does a wordpress theme like my description exist?
Question: I am making our school NASA club website and I’m using WordPress. Everything is working really well, but I want a specific theme for our site. I have looked all over the internet for a FREE theme that suits my needs. What I basically want is this:
- A featured post slider (better if customizable)
- Three columns right below it (ability to put posts from different categories would be really epic)
- A sidebar only on the non-homepage pages
- Preferably a dark the (black)
- Free only (for now)
Any help is extremely appreciated.
Answer: It’s not the theme that does all of that, but rather specialized features. Sometimes a programmer will include it within a theme and then sell the theme at a premium price, but then you’re stuck with their idea of “good functionality”. You can do all of that special functionality for free with plugins by searching the WordPress.org plugin site. Plugins are your best friend.
Post Slider – You’ll find several sliders for images, but some with with posts, too. Posts are usually included in a slider by using either custom field values or by placing them in their own category. Smooth Slider will do posts, pages, and images. That one requires you to insert a tag in the page.php or single.php templates. Personally, being a former programmer, that sucks. See if you can find one that uses shortcode. OR, you could insert the php code right into the page with another plugin that allow for the insertion of raw HTML/PHP. There are many more slide plugins.
Multiple Columns – You can use a magazine-style plugin to create multiple columns, but those usually only work for continual text that flows from one column to the next. There is a plugin called WP Easy Columns that will allow you to create multiple columns. Then within each column you can use another plugin that utilizes short code to display posts from specific categories. It’s called List Category Posts. You can control how many posts to display, from which category, title, how much text from the post or no text at all, lots of parameters. I use it a lot on my blogs.
No Sidebar On Home Page – This one is a little trickier and it depends on your theme and the page templates available within it. I use Artisteer to create all of my WordPress themes and by default, Artisteer automatically creates a no-sidepage page template that can be selected from the page editor page so you can make a page with or without a sidebar. It’s really slick. However, you can roll your own page with no sidebar by following these instructions to create a no-sidebar page.
Change WordPress Theme Colors – This would require changing the CSS and Lord God Almighty, make a backup of your CSS files before you begin tweaking. In the WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance, Editor then in the right sidebar you’ll find the Stylesheets on the bottom of the list. I would comment out (NOT delete) the lines of code for the color settings, and the insert the code with the new colors. This is a complex thing to do because there are color settings for the background, borders, shadows, widget boxes, titles, post body, text, etc. It’s a gigantic undertaking. I suggest making your own theme with Artisteer. There’s no code to write or jack up. The program does it all for you. You don’t need the Standard version. Just get the Home & Academic version for $49.95. Have a bake sale or car wash or something to raise the cash.
WordPress Web Hosting – Be sure to get some decent WordPress web hosting. On most web servers, WordPress is pretty slow. However, I recently tested a new web hosting account of mine at WebHostingHub to see how WordPress performs over there. Their servers are optimized for the demands of WordPress. You can read WebHostingHub WordPress Hosting here, but long story short, there was a significant increase speed in loadtime.
