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Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

Today we are glad to release Infinity — a free professional Wordpress-theme. The theme has 3 fixed columns, thumbnails integration, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter integration as well as an attractive visual design. The theme was designed by Zhang Yichi, the creative mind behind Vikiworks Studio from Shanghai, China especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask our permission first.

• Preview (0.56 Mb)
• Download the theme (.zip-package, 2 Mb)
• Download PSD-sources (.zip-package, 7 Mb)

Features of the theme and Development Kit

• 3 fixed columns design
• Thumbnail covers style
• Flickr, Twitter and delicious integration
• not widget-ready (see the development-kit below)

Currently Yichi is working on an extended version of the theme presented above which will have a style switcher, integration with social networks and a number of JavaScript-based animations. However, at the moment it is quite buggy and he needs your help to get the theme done.

The theme (which is called Mashup) works eventually, but has some strange bugs — for instance, sometimes it freezes for some reason. Please get in touch with him to get the theme done or modify the theme directly:

• Mashup development kit
  (similar to Infinity, but widget-ready and with a style-switcher)

Motivation behind the design

Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.

“Thanks to Vitaly for this great opportunity! I have to admit that I’m not very good at telling stories, basically it’s always been hard to explain every detail on how I get it done and why I did this and that… Partly the idea for this theme is based upon my own theme which has a slightly personal touch and uses vibrant and appealing colors. With some rambling designs and fancy head imagery, I’ve tried to put all pieces together to make the theme literally stand out.

Among other things, the start page window of the Infinity theme has thumnails and offers delicious-integration.

I tried to keep it as simple as possible, unlike regular post entries style, with Wordpress custom filed functions. I’ve used them to show off image titles next to the thumbnails. This design decision is intended to catch reader’s attention in a better way, and it could be a huge advantage for portfolios where designers want to present their photos or design works.

I hope you enjoy this theme and I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme, and for more information please visit my website. Or feel free to ask any questions regarding the theme in comments to this post — I’ll do my best to answer them!”

Posting preview of the Infinity theme

Thank you, Yichi. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

Special requirements

• The theme has no problems in modern browsers and also works fine in Internet Explorer 6.
• Wordpress 2.5 or higher is required.
• Some plug-ins are required for the theme to work (all of them are included in the download-package).

Last but not least…

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).

You may be interested in the following free Wordpress-themes as well:

• Wordpress.Fun: A Free Wordpress Theme
• Fervens: A Free Wordpress Theme
• Dilectio: A Free Wordpress Theme
• Smashing: A Free Wordpress Theme

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/08/infinity-a-free-wordpress-theme/

Download Little Secret

Little Secret theme was made possible in collaboration with Fotobuch, Fruity Web Directory and WordPress Themes Gallery.

http://www.paddsolutions.com/final-round-vote-for-phunk-attack-wordpress-theme/

Techlure features:

• Tested on Wordpress version 2.6
• Adsense Ready
• Advertising blocks
• Three columns
• Clean design
• Cross Browser compatible with IE, FF, Opera, Flock & Safari
• Valid XHTML & CSS
• Widget Ready
• PSD file and readme.txt file included for customization

Download Techlure (217)

http://www.paddsolutions.com/wordpress-theme-techlure/

Features

• 2 Columns - Fixed Width
• Widgets Ready
• XHTML & CSS compliance

Changelog

Version 1.1

• Tested on Firefox 2.0 and IE 6.
• Work in WP2.0 and WP2.1
• Widgets-ready
• Move content code in front of sidebar code for better SEO (tip off: moshu)
• Add edit post link
• Add alt comments
• Add comments on pages
• Bottom menu showing white spaces fixed (thru javascript)

Version 1.2

• XHTML & CSS Compliance
• 404.php added

Version 1.3

• Tag support for WP 2.3

License

This theme is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, hence please leave the author links intact.

Preview

OrangeW2 Demo

Download

- Trackbacks & comments separated.

- Stylized comments.

- Small size (90Kb)

- Web 2.0

- Wide content area.

- XHTML validated.

Test Run | Download

Any Feedback will be appreciated!

There was a time when I wanted to start a Photoshop Tutorials website and searched the Internet for WordPress themes  that will make my blog look like a tutorial website. All my searches were futile and a waste of time as I could not find any theme that does it for me. So, now when I do create free WordPress themes, I thought why not create one myself

So, here you go:-

Tutorial Theme is the first of its kind WordPress Themes, especially designed for running a tutorials website. The theme has been modified in a way where you can make your posts look like actual tutorials. So, now you do not need to hunt anywhere else for a free or paid tutorials script. WordPress has its own Tutorials theme. The back-end work is handled by WordPress and all YOU have to do is post tutorials and more tutorials!

This tutorials theme uses the custom fields to display the thumbnails in front of your posts. So, when writing a post (entering a tutorial), just go to the custom fields box on the bottom of the admin section and define a new key called “thumb”, and for the key value you will have to add the path to your uploaded thumbnail (you get this path when you upload an image to your Wordpress). There is a readme file in the theme folder which will explain the steps to you in detail. Enjoy and don’t forget to leave feedback. You haven’t been doing so lately

Test Run | Download

This plugin is no longer supported or maintained.

Download | Training | FAQ | Release History | Donate

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

How to use it

Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this SEO plugin. You might want to visit Options - All in One SEO to tweak the default options.

• Titles
  The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page. Make sure your titles are getting rewritten and the important stuff (your post titles) always come before anything else. You can leave a few words from your blog title to do some branding but don’t overdo. If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is but change the meta title.
• Descriptions
  Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s mta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. This vastly better than the usual “Share This … Posted on … under …” description that is often used. The preferred source for your post description is your post excerpt. Use this when you want to tweak your description.
• Keywords
  All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories (this was the old way of tagging your posts in wordpress) or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with Wordpress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there. WP 2.3.x tags are the preferred keyword source.
• Duplicate Content
  You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.

That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner. If anything is unclear, some feature is missing, or you are in supplemental results hell feel free to ask.

Per Post/Page Tweaking

One the post/page editing there is a collapsed area named after the plugin. Open it and you can tweak title, keywords and descriptions. In most cases this is not the recommended way. Descriptions can be auto-generated or taken from the post-excerpt (except for pages, here this GUI is necessary). Keywords should be generated by tags and categories. The title can only be tweaked here, and this is a very powerful way to optimize your posts and pages.

This SEO plugin is designed to give you the best options out of the box, however depending on your situation your mileage may vary, and no set of options is perfect for every site. To give you some hint the screenshot below shows how I use it on this blog:

Some “hidden” features

• International Support. There are many translations available, and the number is steadily growing.
• Support for AutoMeta. No need to migrate your thousands of posts that you have tagged with AutoMeta. If AutoMeta has left its data in the Database it is added automatically to the keywords.

http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

K2 is a wildly popular WordPress theme created by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis and Zeo, based on the original Kubrick theme. It is an excellent theme with a lot of customizable features.

I personally like 3-column blogs so I searched on the net for a three-column K2 theme, but couldn’t find anything with a sidebar1-main-sidebar2 layout. Also, it seemed like a lot of other people were looking for a 3-column K2 theme. So I decided to fork-off the K2 theme and create a 3-column K2 theme and name it 3K2. I forked off of K2 r167 and I’m hoping to incorporate the any bugfixes by K2 folks as K2 matures (As of 4/5/06, 3K2 is up-to-date with K2 version 310 in terms of features). I also made some changes to default look and feel of K2.

Here’s a screenshot of the 3K2 theme: (click on image to enlarge)

Download the 3K2 theme by clicking this link

Please keep in mind that this is a beta release. I don’t consider myself a CSS expert by any means. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how and why some of the CSS elements in 3K2 work differently in different browsers, but I did my best to ensure that the theme would look ok in most browsers. As always, if you find any bugs, please let me know.

If you like the theme and use it, let me know so I can provide a link to your site. Also, I’d appreciate if you could support this site by visiting my sponsors or donating via the Paypal button on the left and by linking from your web sites. Thanks for your support!

Also, check out my other themes, 3c-black-letterhead and 3some and some blogging books from Amazon.com

Update (04/05/06): 3K2 is now up-to-date with version 310 of K2. This means it has a lot of new features, including Automattic Widgets support, localization and more!.
Update (04/13/06): Updated element styles for left sidebar, they should now match the right sidebar styles.