Visionary: WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme for news and magazine sites

This theme has been discontinued. Check out ThemeHybrid.com for the new themes.

Features

  • Customized front page to look like a news or magazine site.
  • Sidebar tabbed navigation through the use of a custom jQuery script (jQuery is packaged with the theme).
  • Embed YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe videos easily with Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Or, use the Flash Video Player plugin to input your own videos.
  • Supports the Flickr RSS plugin.
  • Related Posts plugin support.
  • WordPress 2.3 tag-ready, but backwards-compatible with previous versions of WordPress.
  • Custom post information can easily be input through the use of a Visionary theme-specific plugin modified from the custom field GUI plugin.
  • Customized templates for every type of WordPress file, such as category.php and and archive.php.
  • Customized sidebars for different pages of the site.
  • Placeholders for ads. Great sidebar sizes for 125x125px ads.
  • Widget-ready sidebar, but I suggest not using widgets because this theme wasn't designed for them.

Need To Know

  • The readme.txt file will be your best friend when using this theme. Learn to love it.
  • Know how to use optional excerpts to make a cleaner blog when using this theme.
  • Learn how to upload images.
  • You definitely need to know how to use custom fields.
  • Get the latest version of WordPress to make use of tags.
  • You need to understand how the WordPress system works, at least to some extent. This is not a theme for new bloggers, unless you are willing to put in the time to learn a little more about WordPress on your own.

Credits

  • jQuery for the great library, which is used for the tabbed sidebar links and videos.
  • Some of the icons used are from the silk icons set from famfamfam.com.

Licenses

  • If you use this theme, you must leave a link back to me on your site. A full copy of the legal code is in a file called "license.txt," which is included with your download.
  • jQuery is dual-licensed under the GPL and MIT licenses.
  • The FamFamFam icons used are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Thoughts

I’m not even sure where to start when it comes to this theme. I’m proud of it, but it’s been a frustrating two weeks tweaking little things here and there.

This theme really brings everything I’ve worked on in the last couple of months together. It’s a mixture of my current theme (also originally called “Visionary”), the Magtastic theme, the Newspaperize theme, and the Facebooked theme. I’m kind of wrapping everything I’ve learned together, interweaving parts of each one.

With Magtastic, I really wanted to add a video option, but decided against it because I knew the theme wasn’t going to be on any top theme lists. It was mostly just for fun.

The color scheme really came from my current theme and the Newspaperize theme. I liked the reddish colors and wanted to stick with that. I returned to jQuery for the tabs instead of using the DomTab as I did with Magtastic. This idea originated when I was working on Facebooked, but it never got developed.

The Visionary theme has a lot of features, and I’m not going to rehash them all here. I’m particularly proud of how well the video feature works. There still seems to be some bugs with IE6. If you’re using that version of IE, I would greatly appreciate any feedback on what’s going on when you view the theme. I keep having to “Press OK” for the videos to load (that’s 5 times I get an alert box).

The jQuery script definitely came in handy. Anyone who knows me well enough, knows that I hate having to use other people’s scripts and plugins because there’s always something I don’t like about them. That’s why I switched from the DomTabs to creating my custom script through jQuery. It gives me back the control. Also, look for a tutorial or something on how I created this in the coming days.

One thing I want to do with this theme is continue building on it. I think I have a good foundation that I can work from. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do yet. I do plan on releasing another color scheme. I’m looking for a good blue palette to work from.

I also want to continue creating what I call “Modules” in the future. Instead of people using widgets, which screw up so many things, I’ll just release the code that allows them to add this to their sidebar easily. If you poke around in the code a little bit, you might see how I have this set up. There are 8 different sidebars, but they’re not complete sidebars. They’re just part of the overall sidebar, and they can be easily added or removed in the footer.php file.

Overall, I’m happy with how the theme turned out. There’s still a little work to be done, but I’m ready to release it to the WordPress-o-sphere. With that said, report all your bugs here, and I’ll try to exterminate them.