There’s not much to this theme on the surface. It’s pretty basic. Only a few colors. Only a few images. But when you look under the hood, there is much more.
I built it around issues I had with other Wordpress themes and great features I saw in a few. One of the features I used is allowing the theme to be customized through an extra tab in the presentation menu. Of course, now that it is done, there is much more I see that could have been done better.
I attempted to create a theme that didn’t require any manual editing of the theme’s files to customize it. Impossible but I’m stubborn. First I added six sidebars so you can use widgets in six places, two areas in the header, one in the sidebar, and three in the footer.
But you can change more than widgets in this Wordpress theme. You can change all the fonts and you can changes the colors. In fact, this is the same theme that is running on my main blog. You can also choose to activate Adsense through this tab if you want. It’s a 468×60 ad underneath the post title. And it’s colors will match the colors you choose for the theme. You can also activate ClaimID in the header. The image is a Gravatar image and can be customized with your Gravatar email address or can be shut off. The tagline can be on or off. Comments can be on or off on pages. You can also switch out the body’s background image with a url to another image or choose not to have a background image by making the field blank.
But this is still not all. The theme is also set up for Wordpress plugins you may or may not use:
- Landing Sites
- Pagenavi
- Gravatars in Comments
- Related Posts
- Math Comment Spam Protection
- Extended Live Archives
So instead of installing these plugins and then editing the theme, you can just install them and move on.
A few notes. The colors are customizable, so you can create a really ugly theme easily and the widget areas in the top are a fixed size, so you will have to limit the size of widgets there. Oh, and there is only a link to my sites on the index, so you can link to me once and not worry about losing any link juice through the rest of your site.
My next theme is going to be a magazine one. I have learned a lot from creating this one and am ready to tackle more.
More Than Multiple Widgets Wordpress Theme
Update 12/11/2007
Fixed a few minor glitches and added a link to an online color picker from the theme options pages to help you find some colors.
Update 12/12/2007
Fixed an issue with a whitespace at the end of the functions.php file. This was causing random different bugs depending on the installation for some reason. One of the bugs was a feed that is not valid. It may be the cause of some of the other bugs listed in the comments. The current version is up on the site, 1.03.
Update 12/28/2007
Fixed the IE7 float issue and the extra commas in the tag link.
53 Comments
Stephan,
This looks so cool and innovative to my tastes.
My main question, sorry if you answered it and I missed it, is as follows:
I need more than 9 text widgets because I wish to join at least a dozen new web directories. Is it possible to have a theme with unlimited or 20+ text widgets?
Thanks it looks great!
dean
I know that each of the widget areas in the design will hold multiple widgets. I am not quite sure how many or if it is limited by Wordpress somehow. I will have to do some research on that one.
Hello sir , I am pretty new at all of this but i am wondering how to install plugins for this theme?
can you please help.
i was referred to you by a gentleman that i work with that runs a website
called body-secrets.com
well thanks for help if possible.
m.j.j.
The plugins aren’t required to run it, but I will be adding links to all the plugins it is already set up for.
This looks great. I’m assuming this uploads in the wp-content in the themes folder… am I correct?
You are correct.
On my old theme, the content area is semi-transparent. How can I recreate that with this theme?
You could try pasting the word transparent in the color boxes, but I doubt it will look good. Your blog has posts where the background color is transparent but there is also a image background.
Come to think of it, the values you type in the background color fields could be just about anything used in a css background line.
i.e background: “whatever you type in the box”;
So theoretically, you could paste something like “transparent url(images/black_overlay_50.png) repeat scroll 0%” into the box and it should work.
I am not saying you should do this without thinking it through. Some weird things might happen depending on how it affects other backgrounds.
I would watch the sidebar background color. Since to make the sidebar stretch to the bottom part of it is actually a really wide border on the main content. So only use color values in the sidebar.
But thanks for bringing that up. I just realized you could do much more with this theme.
Okay, I’ll try that. Here’s another thing, though. Posts are broken – all the codes are disabled.
This looks really, really nice. I’m definitely going to have to play with this when work and the holidays haven’t left me a useless puddle of sleep-deprived death. Thanks a lot!
Quite possibly this is a stupid question on my part, as I decided to play with it while feeling like death anyway, but is style.css supposed to contain only your commented out text? There’s nothing else in there, and it shows on my site when I activate the theme – there’s no css styling at all. I’ve redownloaded and reuploaded the theme to my server to make sure something wasn’t corrupted, the extra widgets have plugins in them.
Yes, in order for the style to be changed through the extra tab in the presentation menu, the stylesheet is a php file which loads dynamically based on the values you enter. It’s style.php. You shouldn’t have to edit it much though. Most of the changes can be made through the tab shown in the picture above.
It works like the Barthelme theme. I had that theme on a blog for months before I noticed the extra tab.
Here’s a pic showing what I meant about broken posts.
http://a306.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/71/l_7301d81bb8e60e023213c7e07c58c959.jpg
Great idea. Unique approach.
So you lost the visual editor. Strange. I will have to investigate. I have installed this theme on three sites now, two with fresh Wordpress installs and one with plugins activated.
Not sure really what could cause this except maybe interference with other plugins?
Could you give me details of the environment where your site is hosted and the plugins you had installed?
I thought I had run this theme through the wringer, but I guess not.
Ah, ha! Solved. It was the fault of User Level Themes plugin. For some reason, it only happens with this theme.
Thanks for the info. I will check it out and see what causes the problem on my theme’s side.
One more thing: favicon weirdness. My favicon is being changed on the front page, but is correct when I go into siteadmin. I’ve copied my favicon.ico over the one included with this theme, but no change.
Something is stopping the site from reading style.php, then, because absolutely no style is showing at all. The site I’m using this on is a test site, but I’ve included the url up above this time so you can see what I mean. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the extra presentation tab; there’s nothing on that tab that should be totally fubar’ing the entire layout.
Let me ask this – what is the name of the folder that should be uploaded for this theme? I have it uploaded here: wp-content/themes/More Than Multiple Widgets . This is correct, yes?
Shifter has 13 widgetized module positions throughout the page and helps make wordpress more of a content management syste.. I’m glad to see you and other designers begin to make better use of the power of the widget system.
Joel,
I think it’s your browser cache, because the correct favicon shows for me.
kite,
The folder wp-content/themes/More Than Multiple Widgets/ is correct. Really, I am not sure what would cause this. It might be something with your server or you might have to download the file again and reupload it. I don’t know how it happens but sometimes files get fubarred in the downloading, uploading process. I have one Wordpress installation that works, but for some reason I can edit neither the themes or plugins through Wordpress. It says it cannot find the files, even though they are in the right spot.
Do you have any plugins activated?
Buzzdroid,
Awesome design. I figure why create a theme unless you can do something more. This is only my first. My next will be much better. Got some more ideas.
I deactivated the plugins when I saw there was a problem and it didn’t seem to make any difference. I’ll play with it a bit more this weekend and see if I can’t dig up the issue. Thanks for the help!
It was indeed the browser cache. Firefox apparently likes to hang onto favicons and won’t refetch them right away.
BTW – the archive plugin you link to is no longer supported and is a struggle to get working at all.
There are two versions of the plugin, a newer one and an older one. I may have linked to the wrong one. I will do some investigation and see what’s up. I do have one going here: http://www.stephanmiller.com/archives/.
Actually, your link is broken. I managed to find it on my own, and it hasn’t been updated since 2006.
Not sure why it works on my installations, but I guess it’s supposed to be broken for 2.3. But there is a little fix. I found the following link to the fix for Extended Live Archive. I will update the post above also.
http://blog.tinyau.net/archives/2007/07/07/extended-live-archives-for-wordpress-23/
Third re-download and install was the charm. This looks like it’ll do everything I need, thank you!
I’m glad it worked out.
I’m a pain in the butt, I’m sorry.
Is there an easy way to put a logo.gif that is clickable to return to the home page in t1 of the header in place of the text? Googling for help gets me either that plugin to swap out multiple header images, or a link to the template page on the main wordpress site, which doesn’t help at all. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right spots that need changing, I’m just putting the right thing in.
You can edit the header.php file to put the image in.
Just take out everything between div id=”t1″ and its closing /div and put your img src=”" in.
You may have to do some work on the stylesheet.php to get your image exactly where you want.
Thank you! You’re wonderful for taking the time to reply to my questions, I really appreciate it!
I do what I can. Let me know when it’s ready to put on my showcase post.
Okay, looked at the updated ELA and it doesn’t work either. If anything, it’s twice as broken. It appears to require a) being installed in wp-admin (WTF?!?) and b) another plugin, which isn’t mentioned.
Joel,
Okay, maybe I should take that out of the description. I actually tracked down the archives I use and it’s located here: http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/projects/clean-archives/, but I have the exec-php plugin also, so I just pasted the necessary tag into a page and didn’t even mess with the theme.
Ah, yes. That works nicely, thanks. exec-php wasn’t even needed.
WoW Nice. Where did you learn how to make wordpress templates. I have a few ideas for a template. Is there a base template I could start from?
There is lot of info on this page:
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/wordpress/wordpress-theme-design/
One of the first lines lists a place to download blank themes.
I think I might have found a bug in the theme. When you have a very short post and you’re viewing it in IE, the #bottom part of the site moves up to be right under said post. This makes #bottom partially cover up the right-hand sidebar. You can see a screencap here. I am not CSS savvy enough to fix something like this – can it be fixed?
That’s not good. I will have to take a look at it and update the theme after the holidays.
I feel awful for bringing these things up, but I really like the theme (and I’ll keep using it even if you can’t fix that IE bug – I don’t think it’ll be an issue for me.) ^^; Here’s another tiny.. not bug, just something to tweak. WordPress seems to include the comma between tags automatically. If you look at your tag lists on posts, you have a lone comma floating at the beginning. The comma needs to be removed from the php code for tagging and then it shows fine. (And if you’d rather I not let you know about these things, let me know and I’ll shut up!)
Hope you have a happy holiday!
Will take a look at that too. I knew about that one. I was just ignoring it for a while though.
Both the tagging issue and the IE7 float issue fixed. The new files are ready for download.
Great themes, even with some of the issues I’ve encountered. So I’m hoping you or someone can help.
Is it possible to switch out the header background with an image background? I have tried modifying the style.php by adding an background image url, but without any luck. Did I maybe just use the wrong code?
‘background: url(images/header2.jpg);’
And how do I add my image into the tagline area, like you did. I’ve tried setting the “use gravatar in header” field to “yes” and then adding my email address, but to no avail. All I get is some gravatar image in the header
Also after changing the “use gravatar in header” setting to “yes”, and then saving, the “use gravatar in header” setting returns to “no”. Is that a problem, or something that is supposed to happen? The gravatar image does stay, until I save again, without resetting the “use gravatar in header” setting to “yes”, i.e. leaving it set to “no”.
Thanks,
Ok I did figure out the picture in the tagline, so forget that question, but I still can’t figure out how to add my own background image in the header.
Marc, you will have to edit style.php to put an image in the header background. Both the top and the bottom will have the same background image if done through the options.
Stephan this theme is quite unique in the way it uses widgets to put anywhere you want. Otherwise it is quite a pain if you want to add a section in a theme in the header for example. I think this is a feature that should be standard in new themes(to add widgets anywhere not just sidebar). I will write about this theme in my blog as I am sure that many people will like the customization ability it provides.
Thanks Jawwad,
The reason why I created this theme was because I was looking for one like it. I finally gave up looking.
We switched our personal blog about medicinal cannabis – the3lb.com – over to your theme a couple weeks back and couldn’t be happier with how it’s looking and working.
If you ask us, your use of multiple sidebars – especially those in the header and footer – is pure genius.
We’d been searching for a long time to find a theme that would work FOR our vision of what to create – rather than imposing it’s own vision. Your sweet little theme really fits the bill.
Thanks!
Thanks for using it and the compliments. I’ll try to get a screenshot up in the showcase post soon. You know how that goes though.
Have you found any need for updating this great theme in light of WP 2.5?
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