About the template

The template was created using blue, green and white colors. It has a header area, a main content floating to the right, a sidebar floating to the left and a footer area. The design was built based on what I call a “pencil draw” simulation, used to create the corners of the containers and as background for various inpage elements. The header area has a search form, so the one in the sidebar is not necessary anymore.

The design

The design is not very complicated and/or graphic emphasized. The containers were built using 3 (three) <div> elements which overlap one over another to create the box effect. The DTD used for the HTML code is XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The fonts used for the template are Trebuchet MS and Georgia.

The header area

The header area contains a heading formatted as a link for the name of the blog, and the description of the blog goes under it. Those two elements are placed on the left side. On the right side I placed a search form.
The last element is the menu container. The template supports custom menus as it is emphasized in WordPress codex about wp_nav_menu(). As the documentation says, if no custom menu is defined the function will fallback to wp_page_menu, else if name argument has no value defined or the value defined doesn't match the name of any custom menu defined, the function's name argument will take the name of the first custom menu defined (with the lowest ID). To use any other custom menu you have to manually add the menu name in the functions.php file in the navigation menu section. The menu supports two levels deep navigation (the parent will have children, and the children will have children), which means that the style sheet formats the menu list elements to be displayed. If you want more you have to add the proper formatting for the third level and so on (i.e.: div#menu ul ul ul ...). You have to pay attention to the order the CSS properties are declared, as long as they are served to the HTML page from top to bottom of the style.css.

The main content container

This container floats to the right. The main page file, index.php takes the while loop for the exiting posts and displays the entire content of the posts, not the excerpt. Based on the way the container is created, it was simple to add a conditional statement for the sticky post and with the help of the CSS properties to emphasized it on page. The pages supports wp_link_pages() function which will add links to the next pages of one post, if it is split in more than one parts. Another function used is wp_list_pages() to add a link inside the page to the child pages of the current page. The page.php and single.php pages has the comment form built using the comments_template() function. Also I added a filter to change the messages of the input elements' labels. The template supports nested comments, three levels deep. If you want more, you have to add the proper style properties to achieve the desired effect. The comments made by the administrator and by the author of the post are styled to be displayed different from the other comments. But, you have to modify in the style.css file the statements for the comment-author-administrator class, if your nickname, as it appears in the dashboard of your user admin (or editor) page, is different from administrator, and change it to the nickname you have. Otherwise, no change to the comment style. The comment li elements are not styled differently for even and odd classes. In the next version this will be added.

The template also has a 404.php, a search.php and an archive.php page. If you want to use the archive.php page read how to create an archive page.

The sidebar

The sidebar floats to the left and it supports widgets. By default it has 4 (four) custom widgets defined: Category, Blogroll, Archives (monthly) and Meta. Also in functions.php file has 3 (three) custom widgets declared: Custom Calendar, Custom Search Form and Custom Tag Cloud.

The footer

The footer has 2 functions which will generate a list of 3 (three) links for random posts and 3 (three) links for random pages. These two containers will float to the left, and on the right side are posted credentials for the template's author.

Credits

The template is released under GPL v3 license. You can use it as it is, modify it, for commercial or non-commercial use.

You can DOWNLOAD the template from WordPress site. A LIVE PREVIEW of the template is available also.