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Download ColdBlue

Theme Information

• Author Information: Matt of WebRevolutionary.com
• Description: ColdBlue is a two column, right sidebar, widget ready WordPress theme.

Comments by Small Potato

I like ColdBlue…a lot. It’s a solid, very clean, and flexible theme. What more can you ask for in a WordPress theme? However, it’s still rough around the edges. After several fixes, there’s quite a lot to be done or can be done with ColdBlue. Given that this is Matt’s first public release, ColdBlue is an awesome looking theme.

I wish my first public theme release was like this :).

Download myJournal Hypereal

or View Live demo

Author Information

Designed by Hans N.Coomar from BlogoSquare based on the original code of the Sandbox by Andy and Scott from plaintxt.org.

Description

A lightning fast, white minimalist, 3-column theme, SEO optimised and coming pumped full of features like quick shooting stats at the footer listing number of posts, comments and categories; welcome back feature to greet returning visitors with a message to entice them to subscribe(found at sidebar) or displaying comment’s author’s name when the latter comes back for another comment.

Plus, all the great features of the Sandbox like ability to style every single component of your blog so instead of relying on a plugins to style asides, you can style the asides category itself.

I also provide free help, advice, and support for any issues you may be having with the theme so please do let me know if something is bugging you.

Preview Pride

Author information

Designed and coded by Small Potato

Theme Description

The second release of the Seven Deadly Sins series, Pride is a three-column, fixed-width theme, compatible with WordPress 2.0.x, 2.1.x, and 2.2.

Although it seems graphic intensive, Pride is a lightweight theme. Excluding the heavy footer background image, Pride uses less than 9kb of images. There are instructions in the readme.txt file on how to switch to a less heavy footer background image.

Files

• Download Pride

Author’s Note

I’m jealous of bloggers that get to use this theme. The only thing that’s stopping me from using Pride for Wpdesigner.com is the need to keep Wpdesigner’s unique design.

Are you greedy for sidebars? The official release of Greed, it’s finally here! Preview Greed.

Author information

Greed was designed and coded by Small Potato.

Theme Description

Greed is a three-column to five-column hybrid Wordpress theme with ten widget-ready sidebars. Released under GPL, it’s the first released theme of the Seven Deadly Sins theme series.

Features

• Compatible with WordPress 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 series.
• Fixed-fluid width
• Easy to rotate main column and sidebars. Double right sidebars example.
• Switchable banner, background color, and more through the theme options page.
• Able to hold an infinite number of sidebars. 30 sidebars example (10 default and 20 additionals).
• Compatible with / supports over two dozen plugins.

Files: (version .09 RC2)

• Download Greed
• Download Greed Light - This is a the light version, which comes with only two visible, default sidebars.

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Download Orange Sky

Author Information

Orange Sky was designed and coded by Naoko McCracken.

Description

A beautiful two column, widget-ready, right sidebar theme with a cool color scheme and warm banner.

Comments by Small Potato

Stepping into WordPress theme development, Orange Sky wasn’t one of the themes that I learned from. No, it was THE theme that I learned from. I tore it apart and tried to digest bit by bit. Not only did Orange Sky taught me WordPress techniques, it introduced me to the Sliding Doors of CSS (horizontal navigation with background image tabs).

Although I don’t usually recommend learning from old WordPress themes because you need to stay up-to-date with the new WordPress versions, Orange Sky is an exception.

Download Prosense

Author Information

ProSense is the product of a collaboration by Dosh Dosh and The Wrong Advices.

Description

ProSense is a flexible, three-column theme with integrated Adsense ads.

Theme Comments by Small Potato

For me, Prosense was just another Adsense-ready theme. I was reluctant to feature this theme until I actually learned something new from it. I learned how to squeeze a banner in between two posts (inter-post ads integration) from ProSense, which is VERY useful if you’re trying to place only one or two banners instead of one banner for every post in the content area. Inter-post integration sounds complicated and most bloggers don’t know how to do it. But today, I learned that it’s very easy to do!

More about the ads or Adsense ads in ProSense, I’m disappointed that not all the Adsense templates have the same format. The Adsense templates or include files should contain only the Adsense codes. Second, ProSense should create a separate file for your Adsense publisher ID number and include that file in within the Adsense codes. That way, you don’t have to replace the default publisher ID again and again for each Adsense template; there are seven of them. Also, some areas around the ads are not valid codes. Especially true for the left sidebar Adsense, it’s missing a set of LI tags.

Overall, this a basic, flexible theme that’s useful for bloggers and new theme designers. You’ll learn quite a few techniques from ProSense.

Download Grid Focus

Author Information

Theme focus was designed and coded by Derek Punsalan of 5ThirtyOne.com.

Description

Grid Focus is a three-column, black and white theme with two sidebars and top and bottom horizontal navigation menus. It’s a public, modified version of the 5ThirtyOne.com’s current WordPress theme.

Comments by Small Potato

Grid Focus is a sharp looking theme.

Core-wise, it focuses more on style than functionality. Grid Focus was not built for the average blogger and / or wordpress.com user. I’m featuring this theme purely for its look.

First of all, I love the black and white. Black and white themes will only get more and more popular. Second, I like the expandable archive links. It’ll allow users to interact with your blog’s design. Third, whether it’s intentional, I agree with Derek’s decision to exclude the category link listing from the post meta data.

On the other hand, Grid Focus is not widget-ready. It has a lot of hardcoded links and areas that you have to manually customize. Again, this theme was not built for the average blogger. Also, Grid Focus is missing some functions like the wp_link_pages() in the page.php and single.php file. One last thing, Grid Focus doesn’t style its blockquotes to clearly separate regular text from blockquote text.

In the end, this theme has a lot of potential. The style is there. The personality is there. It just needs to get whipped into tip-top shape.

Download 5ThirtyOne v2

Theme information

• Author: Derek Punsalan
• Description: Two-column theme with lightbox features and support for the following plugins: Ryan’s Contact Form, Author Comment Highlight, and Ultimate Tag Warrior.
• License: GPL

Download Pink Beauty

Theme information

• Author: Yoru
• Description: A two-column, fixed width, pink, flowery theme with widgetized sidebar and footer block.
• License: Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike
• Requirement(s): This theme requires you to attribute to the original work by retaining the footer links to WordPress and Cureless.

Thanks so much to Small Potato for allowing me to feature this theme on WPDesigner.

Download Salmon

Theme information

• Author: Justin Shattuck
• Description: A two to three columns, blue and pink theme.

Author’s Note

The new theme is titled, “salmon,” because of its pink and blue color tones. I have decided to leave most of the original design style in tact. Upon uploading and activating the theme, you will need to modify sidebar.php and place your Flickr ID as well as modify header.php to include the links to your various pages within the navigation.

Theme Comments by Small Potato

Salmon is based on JustinShattuck.com’s current blog design. Recently, there have been several JustShattuck.com-inspired themes released. I’m featuring Salmon because it’s the best looking version and it’s coming straight from JustinShattuck.com.

Needless to say, I like this theme. It’s clean, spacious, and has a nice color scheme. My favorite design feature of Salmon is its search form. Call me weird, but the search form is my favorite!

Code-wise, Salmon needs a bit of work. For starter, the header has three differently links, linking back to the home page; that’s too many links pointing to the same page.

Second, the Page template isn’t styled properly; font size on the Page template is 12px instead of the home-page 11px. Also, the Page template doesn’t call for the comments form.

Third, the Comments Template function is used within an if-else statement in the index.php file to display the comments form only on Single pages. However, the single.php file or template already uses the Comments Template function. Therefore, there’s no need to place the Comments Template function within an if-else statement in the index.php.

Fourth, the middle sidebar needs the Recent Comments plugin to display properly.

Download Bosco

Theme information

• Author: Michael Pollock
• Description: A two-column, widget-ready theme.

Theme Comments by Small Potato

Bosco is a solid theme from an experienced WordPress theme developer, Michael Pollock (solostream.com). But, there’s always room for improvement.

In the next version of Bosco, I’d like to see the Digg link, in the postmetadata area, attach the the post permalink. Currently, the Digg link points to digg.com/submit.

Also, the Page template doesn’t use the comments template. I think readers should be able to comment on every page, by default. Adding the comments template to the page.php is a plus.

One last thing, the highlighted post dates are a bit distracting. I’d prefer a light or dark gray background color for post date, instead of a black background.

Download Freshy

Theme information

• Author: Julien De Luca
• Description: A two-column, translatable, widget-ready theme.
• License: GPL

Theme Comments by Small Potato

Julien took it a step further with the Freshy’s theme option page to allow you to customize the color scheme and banner. Most theme option pages that I’ve seen simply allow you to turn on extra features, not customize them.

I would be happy using Freshy right out of the box, without configuration or any modification. However, internally, Freshy could use some more testing, not by users, but by theme developers.

Freshy is missing the Archives (archive.php) and Page (page.php) templates. Also, the Comments Template function doesn’t need to be in the index.php file, since Freshy does use the single.php file.

Other than that, I would remove the individual category RSS icons, unless Freshy had a wider sidebar. In my opinion, the category RSS icons clutter the sidebar.