Designredux Free WordPress Theme Updated to Version 0.2
3 weeks after the release of version 0.1, I have finally added all the finishing touches for version 0.2 of Designredux, and it is still free. The live demo has been updated with the latest version for your viewing pleasure. Visually there has only been minor changes to the overall design. They were just little tweaks here and there to improve the look. A few odd bugs were fixed as well.
Most of the changes though are in the back end. Most notably the addition of a custom admin panel, custom pages, and it is now widget-ready. The following are the list of changes made.
Custom Admin Panel
Most of the work was done here. And most of the work means a lot of work. In order to maximize the use of the WordPress theme in version 0.1, it required you to go into the code and make some changes. With the creation of the custom admin panel, that is no longer necessary.
Navigation
In version 0.1, the navigation on top of the theme displayed all the categories as links. This was obviously going to be a problem when there are too many categories or you don’t want to display every single category there. In order to fix that, I created an admin panel for the navigation so you can now pick which category you want displayed. You can pick as many or as little as you want.
Bottom right of the footer
This area required the edit of the about_text.txt file in order to make changes to its content in version 0.1. Now you can just change it from the admin panel and you can also change the title for that area.
Feedburner
Efforts have been made in this area to make it easier to add your feedburner account and activate subscribe by email without having to edit the code yourself. If you don’t have a feedburner account, it will just default to WordPress’s rss feed.
Google Adsense
Easy integration of Google adsense is now available for the sidebar and post’s footer. All you have to do is paste the code in the admin panel. I also designed it so the integration of google adsense will look nice. But it does require that you set your Google adsense to use #EEEEEE as the background and border color or else it will look sloppy You don’t have to, but your efforts will be rewarded. Check out the demo to see what I mean.
Google Analytics
Just paste google analytics code into the admin panel and you are done. No need to edit.
Documentation
Added a section to explain everything in the settings below the admin panel.
Custom Pages
Version 0.1 had no custom pages so these were added to cover the basic types of pages found on blogs.
Search.php
In the absence of a search.php file, WordPress uses the index.php to decide how to display the results. Not the best idea so I created the search.php so that the search results look nicer.
Page.php
Again WordPress used the index.php to decide how things looked when pages were displayed when page.php is missing. Now regular pages look much better.
404.php
The page you get when someone gets lost on your blog.
Archives.php
The archives page needs to be activated by creating a page in WordPress, you can call this page anything you want, a good name is Archives. Then go to the page templates section of the page and choose “Archives” in the drop down menu. That’s all you have to do.
Conclusion
A lot of work has already been done on this theme, but there are more coming. More tutorials will continue to roll out soon on how to take this theme to the next level. If you have any requests or ideas, please feel free to leave a comment, send an email, or tweet me on twitter about it.
