This theme is intended for use with WordPress 3.0. It has not been tested with earlier releases of WordPress and may not work properly with them. If you’re still using an earlier version of WordPress you may want to look at my older themes. You can find out more about and download the old themes on this post on my OpTempo blog: Dateless Mini-Site WordPress Themes.

Basically, the theme is a quite plain, 2 column theme with a small header and footer area. While some people like the wide open expanses of space a design like the new WordPress default Twenty Ten theme does, others like a tighter columnar site layout. That is one of the design goals in this theme.

No dates are displayed anywhere in this theme, making it ideal for niche sites that have ‘evergreen’ content.  You can force a date to display only if you use the Archive widget but I’m going to assume that you aren’t going to use this.

The theme uses WordPress functions to allow you to set the header graphic, adjust the header text color and whether or not to display or not display the header text and background color. The header text color is automatically coordinated with the text color of the sidebar titles and background color is coordinated with the background on the sidebar headers and with the footer. This will help you make color coordination a snap but you can dig into the theme code and change this behavior if you wish. All these are handled by standard WordPress administrative menus.

There are 4 widget areas available in the theme. There is the standard sidebar and 3 widget areas intended primarily for pasting in advertising codes such as Adsense. Content Header is a 468×60 area above each post/page title. The Content Title Area is an open area just below the post/page title that’s 572 pixels in width and ideal for eBay or Amazon product displays. The Content Left widget area is 336×280 that floats to the left. This is considered an ideal placement for Adsense. To paste in your advertising code, simply add a text widget to the area and paste it in. It’s just that simple. I’ve turned off default WordPress text filtering in the widgets so that your ad code won’t get mangled.

Here’s an example of the theme that has had a header and background graphic uploaded and the text colors set to match. Also, an eBay Partner Network widget has been added as a text widget in the Content Title Area. I have found this particular layout to convert quite well when matched with reviews and other useful information for visitors.

The footer area is a new WordPress 3.0 menu area. This allows you to use custom menus in this area. For example, if you only wanted your blog name and a link to your policies page in the footer this feature makes this easy to configure and setup. This area does not support multi-level menus though.

One last feature I wanted to mention was that I have a ‘no content widgets’ page template in the theme. This allows you to create policy pages and such without having advertising on them.

The primary SEO optimization in the theme is that all post/page titles are H1 tags and all other H? tags in the theme are either H4 or H5, leaving H2 and H3 available for your in-post styling.

In spite of the new features, the theme code remains stripped down. It’s lean and mean and easy for even a novice to modify if you want to do some simple changes to it such as changing font style or size. You are even allowed to nofollow or even remove the credits footer link if you want although I’d really appreciate it if you left it in as is.

Let me know what you think about this theme and if you have any questions or suggestions for improvements to it in a comment below.

It would be rather tedious to type this in for almost every post and, if I wanted to change anything about it, I’d have to go back to edit each post, quite tedious. So, instead, I added a simple WordPress shortcode to the theme’s “Theme Functions” (functions.php) file. Setting this kind of thing for yourself only requires a little basic HTML/CSS/PHP knowledge and basic how to edit a WordPress theme knowledge.

Here’s the code and I’ll break it down for you afterwards…

function DownloadButton($values)
{
 extract(shortcode_atts(array(
"link" => ''
), $values));
$returnvalue = "";
if (! $link == '')
{
$returnvalue = "<div class=\"downloadbutton\"><a href='" . $link . "'>
<img src=\"/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/plugindownload.png\"
alt=\"Click to Download\" title=\"Click to Download\"
width=\"185\" height=\"60\" /></a></div>";
}
return $returnvalue;
}
add_shortcode('Download', 'DownloadButton');

First, we define a function, in this case “DownloadButton” with the variable for the array of variables sent to the function by WordPress.

Next, we want to extract the values from the parameter array. In this case, we only have the one parameter we’re wanting to pass, ‘link’. So, we use the built-in WordPress function to extract the shortcode attributes into our local variable $link.

After that, we want to see if the $link variable contains anything. If it doesn’t, we want to ignore the code. Otherwise, we want to generate the code we want placed at the spot in the post or page where the shortcode was located.

I know, the next part will make your brain sweat if you are afraid of code but it’s actually pretty simple. Here we’re building the HTML string to be displayed. The tricky part is that we will need to ‘escape’ the double quotes with a backslash and use the PHP concatenation operator, a period, to insert our variable value into the HTML code.

As the final part of the function, we want to return the value we generated. It is important to return the value from the function rather than echoing it. This insures that the HTML code will be placed correctly on the page.

After the function, we’ll want to execute the WordPress add_shortcode function. Otherwise, the shortcode won’t be setup. It is important that this call is outside of any function brackets so that it gets called on each page load on the WordPress site. The add_shortcode function’s first parameter is the name of the shortcode, in this case ‘Download’, and the second is the name of the function to call, in this case ‘DownloadButton’.

Now, after you save, the shortcode is ready to use. All you have to do is enter the code the post/page editor and the code will be inserted automatically. It would look something like this…

[Download link=”http://thelayoutsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/carwashco1.zip”].

Before you make any changes to a live theme, and especially the functions.php file, it is essential that you have a good backup of the file. Making changes and making a mistake while doing so can disable your blog. You want to be able to quickly replace a bad file with a working copy.

If you have any questions about how to create shortcodes in WordPress, please feel free to ask and I’ll try to help you out.

Here’s a church website template. This template includes HTML code and graphics, including Photoshop PSD’s. The design is a simple table based design.