Structure: WordPress Theme

Structure: A quality WordPress theme for news and magazine sites

The Structure theme has a new home!

The Structure theme is now hosted on ThemeHybrid.com.

Theme Information:

  • Description: A theme for news/magazine sites with a blog-friendly option too. It includes built-in video and image features that easily allow you to customize your site. There are content blocks that you can place virtually anywhere on the page.

Like this theme?

  • Vote for it on WP Themez.
  • Make a donation with your PayPal account (this is completely optional and was added due to a few requests).

Structure in other languages:

Contact me if you’d be interested in helping out with translations into any language, correcting mistakes, or helping out.

I’ll add the old version 1.1.5 translations to the release archive in the next couple of days. Version 1.2 should be ready for localization. Let me know if you want to help out.

Features:

  • A custom home page to look like a news or magazine site.
  • There's an optional normal blog layout for the home page.
  • Set on a 300px, 3-grid layout that lets you move various content blocks around the page. Switch home.php and sidebar.php elements for a custom look.
  • Sidebar tabbed and home page category posts navigation through the use of a custom jQuery script.
  • Embed YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe videos easily with Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.
  • Supports the Flickr RSS plugin.
  • Related Posts plugin support.
  • Also, plugin support for Popularity Contest by Alex King.
  • WordPress 2.3 tag-ready, but backwards-compatible with previous versions of WordPress with a single modification.
  • There are custom templates for each type of WordPress page, such as category.php, archive.php, and search.php.
  • Ability to change sidebar for different pages of the site.
  • Placeholders for ads. Good sizes for 125x125px ads.

Many different layout styles:

I need to update this to reflect version 1.2.

Need To Know:

  • 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 (not necessary since 1.2).
  • Get the latest version of WordPress to make use of tags.
  • You need to understand how WordPress works, at least to some extent. This is not a theme for new WordPress bloggers, unless you are going to learn a little about the system on your own.

Credits:

  • jQuery for the great library, which is used for the tabbed sidebar links and videos.

Licenses:

  • If you use this theme, you must leave a link back to me on your site. The full license is included with the download in a file named "license.txt."

Thoughts:

There are some things I wanted to do with this theme that I did do and others that I didn’t. Mostly, I think it turned out all right. One thing I didn’t get around to was putting together a “Theme Options” page for the WordPress dashboard. This is something I definitely want to do in a future release. It would make it much easier to customize.

Another thing I wanted to do was create a theme that was better than Visionary. I had a lot of issues (personal) with that theme. I fixed many of those with the Structure theme.

The layout is set on an imaginary 3-column grid, with each grid around 300px wide. The reason I done this was so that a user could take different blocks of content and move them from the sidebar, to the bottom of the home page, and vice versa. There’s a lot of things you can play around with, and even add some of your own content in a custom content block. I originally had this idea with Visionary, but couldn’t really implement it in the way I wanted because of the size of the sidebar. That’s why you’ll notice that the video option is different.

You’ll definitely see the similarities in the two themes, but this one has much more potential for customization. I think it looks a bit cleaner too. Plus, I wanted to do something in blue. I’ve worked on this theme for the past month, but didn’t figure out what I wanted to do with it until last week. Since then, I’ve been working non-stop.

There’s more jQuery in the theme, and this could potentially be a bad thing for bloggers with a lot of users on slower connections because the jQuery is used to hide tabs. Under these tabs is a lot of information. This could take a little longer to load.

I’m sure there are a gazillion bugs that I need to fix, and I’ll get around to them at some point. This first week or so for the theme release is a debugging week. There are so many different options that it would be too hard and take too long to test them all myself.

Now, I’m going to bed. Feel free to report your bugs, complaints, and/or praise in the comments section below. Also, subscribe to the feed to be updated when new content comes out.