Jubel and The Unessential

Arthemia Free v2 is now available. With the paged plugin support, nice border for pictures, automated page listing in navigation bar, improved layout of front-page, archive page, and search page. Thumbnails are now working in all pages. Click here to read more.

Arthemia is combining a magazine and a weblog into one; it is not too magazine-ish nor too blog-ish. The front page of Arthemia shows the headline and featured post of yours along with the pictorial representation, that’s the magazine style, while the rest of your post will be shows sequentially just like a usual weblog. In the middle of the front page, Arthemia has a nice blue-and-black category bar which will help your readers exploring you site. At the bottom, Arthemia is outfitted with a blog must-have section, a three-list of favorite posts.

A Drop-down Menu?

Exactly. A drop-down menu is now becoming a standard navigational tools. Many Linoluna users said that a drop-down menu is quite a must-have thing in a website. Well, I am giving you what you want. It is a black elegant drop-down menu with a nice blue background when you move your mouse to hover it.

Automatic Image Resizer?

Yup! Arthemia uses a PHP Script to automatically resize the thumbnail image. Fabulous, huh? Just upload any image using Wordpress image uploader, and the thumbnail is there. Thanks to Darren Hoyt for the awesome release. There is a folder called ’scripts’ which contains the PHP image resizer scipt, timthumb.php. Inside the folder, there is another folder called ‘cache’. You have to make this folder writable by changing the folder attributes to 777 using any FTP clients or SSH access.

What plugins should I have?

For the best functionality, you should have the plugin WP-PostView, WP-PostRating, WP-Print, WP-Email installed. Those plugins are from LesterChan.net.

WordPress version? Browser compatibility?

Arthemia is build to support Wordpress 2.5. A gravatar support has been included. Anyway, if you want to use the theme in WP 2.3, you have to remove the gravatar code in comments.php. The theme has been tested in several browsers such as Firefox 2, IE 7, Safari 3, and Opera 9, and even IE 6. By the way, dropdown menu and link hovering don’t work in IE6. Everything is working like a charm.

Great, how to install this thing?

It is very easy; just as simple as this 3-step installation:

1. Download and extract the zip file.
2. Upload the theme file to your server at “/wp-content/themes/” folder.
3. Activate the theme. (Admin Panel -> Presentation -> Themes)

That’s it. After that you can go with the configuration.

I’m done. Any configuration I should do?

Apparently YES. Arthemia is not really a plug-and-play theme. But believe me, this is not as difficult as it seems.

1. The theme is widget-ready. By default, the navigation is divided into three sections: the top navigation bar, the right sidebar, and the footer. Everything in the sidebar and footer may be customized easily through WP Admin Panel. The links in the top navigation bar should be edited manually using any text-editor of your favorite. I prefer Notepad. The top navigation bar can be customized by editing the header.php file.
2. To use Arthemia, you need to have a category named “Headline” and “Featured”. Posts in those two categories will be shown in the headline and featured section of the front page.
3. To show the category bar in the front page properly, you have to put the correct category IDs to this line in the index.php file:
   <?php $display_categories = array(5,6,7,8,11); $i = 1;
foreach ($display_categories as $category) { ?>
   Notice that 5, 6, 7, 8, and 11 are the IDs of the category to be shown in the category bar.
4. To show the post list in the front page properly, you have to put the correct excluded category IDs to this line in the index.php file:
   <?php $page = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("cat=-9,-15&paged=$page&posts_per_page=2"); ?>
   Notice that 9 and 15 are the IDs for the category: Headline and Featured. That will make no duplication shown in the front page. posts_per_page=2 means there are 2 posts listed per page. The navigation links are shown after the last listed post. You can change that to Lester-Chan’s WP-Pagenavi if you like.
5. Thumbnails across the theme are configured using the Custom Fields. And images can be easily uploaded with WP Add Media feature. You should add a custom field called “Image” in every post and put the image filename and folder within the custom field value. For example, custom field name: Image; custom field value: wp-content/uploads/2008/04/pool.jpg. How about the different image sizes for each thumbnails? Well, no worry for that because Arthemia has its own image resizer. Just upload one big-sized image and everything is under control.

So, what now? Go download or see the live demo!
This file has been downloaded 47590 times.

Anyway, if you find the theme cool, helpful, inspiring, or whatsoever, I guess it’ll be a pleasure to donate me some money. I will be really thankful for that.

Changelog:
V1.0 First public release
V1.1 Added the pagination support for the blog post lists in the front page.
V2.0 Installed the paged plugin, added nice border for pictures, added the automated page listing in navigation bar, improve the layout of front-page, archive page, and search page. Thumbnails are now working in all pages. Click here to read more.

Note:
Arthemia theme may use the same CSS Class and IDs with some plugins out there. If you install this theme and then find the layout awful, there might be some conflicts with one of your plugin. Recently, I find that Arthemia might have some layout problem (the top navigation bar) if you have “Mike Jolley and Mike Cherim’s Secure and Accessible PHP Form” installed. But now the problem is solved!

My next theme: Platformate with automatic thumbnail assignment

Anyway, it seems that this thumbnail assignment thing has gone way to complicated to some people. Therefore, I’m planning to have an automatic picture assignment feature in my next theme: Platformate. Thumbnails are automatically generated, resized, and assigned. So you can just blog normally, add pictures to your posts just like usual add-media/add-image Wordpress feature, forget the complicated custom-field thing, and the first picture in your post will be automatically assigned as the image for thumbnail generation.

If you have any problem using the theme and want to ask for support, please use the forum instead.