WP Paragraph(e)

I was thinking in create a solid and flexible, standard WordPress theme, to allow any kind of internet publisher having at their disposal a comfortable tool, a consistent design, and a clean, validated code, in order to start a long run project.

This way was how the Peppermint Theme was born. As curated in the inside as it is in the outside, easy to browse and work with – both, for the readers and for the admins-, Peppermint arrives as a new contribution to the blog / magazine format, with all the needed features to acquire a wide, memorable space in the net.

Please note, the theme’s price include all the customizations that you as user plan for your project, so you can ask me for any feature to implement, for no extra fee.

Default features of The Peppermint :

Pages

A transparent dark film is the background for the top Pages in the header. The space, 950 pixels wide, have room for a true battery of Pages, reflecting a further hierarchy, and showing the static sections and sub-sections of your Blog.

Useful not only for the About, Search, or Contact Pages, but also for an access to any kind of taxonomy space, where to list tags, categories, links, and archives by date, author or subject, as well as for those special Pages that your Plugins can require, or just some custom spaces to deploy a “surrounding” architecture around the main site’s content.

By default, all of the Parent Pages will be listed, alphabetically.

Header

Maybe one of the most prominent elements in the design is the green, textured header. A little bit of Photoshop magic, and a clear, white Georgia font will do the work for us in order to gain the attention and the first impression in the site : we have content to deliver.

Next to it, a soft but clear Search Box, driving to the Search Results Page, will keep in every new page loaded, with a particular color palette to offer a fresh detail to the most ‘researchers’ between our users.

Menu

The Main Menu is conceived to display specific categories, that you will choose from the Admin Panel. Every item will print a category by its Slug Name, slug that you will assign easily, without changing any ‘real’ cat’s name.

Our seven Main Cats in the Menu are called whether they get marked, by you as an Admin, with the following peppermint-slugs (invisible for the user, visible for WordPress, and that you must quick-edit, in your cats).

They are :

1. firstcat
2. secondcat
3. thirdcat
4. fourthcat
5. fifthcat
6. sixthcat
7. seventhcat

That way, the category slugged as ‘firstcat’, whatever its ‘real’ name be, will be printed (with its real, normal name) in the first menu item.

The blog’s description and the author’s archive little red link

In order to optimise the receptions in your site, the users will receive a welcome message, again writable from the backend : we are here asking to WordPress for printing our blog’s description, that we will use in all of its power.

A little link will sign that welcome message, bringing to the user, if it’s clicked, to an archive page, showing the latest post written by the main editor in your site.

To specify which exact name will be shown here, you must go the Users sections in your Blog, and change the public name with which you as an admin will be identified by your users.

The Featured Ones

Now it comes the innovative part. How to find a way to show some featured content that we accept as balanced, but that be distinctive at the same time ? How to use a style to organize the best of the week, that everybody will recognize as yours, and find it useful … because appealing ?

Several solutions for us to do it :

Featured Series : three special categories that you will create, and name as you wish, are shown at the first look. They must have as a slug (invisible for the user, visible for WP) the following keynames :

1. featured1,
2. featured2,
3. featured3 ; again, a simple quick-edit in your cats is the only step required to set them up.

Rounded corners, encapsulated content : all is about the user’s path.

Cropped images : letting know partially, but visibly, the nature of the article to come (some changes in our CSS can restore a conventional image).

Cool Excerpts : über-styled excerpts to put in value our recommended posts, in grey & blue, with some sweet dots towards the single article.

All of our latest posts

And finally, to make happy the more focused users, a big list (the number of posts to show are controlled in your WP settings) of the last posts is waiting to be read, showing date, tags and number of comments.

The Footer : Widgets ? Widgets.

We are ending our Index Page with (oh, surprise) the Footer. Obviously, a non-widgetized Footer is something in peril of extinction : we need archives, we need recent comments, we need lists of links, we want custom text snippets, credits, pages again, recent posts across our whole site. And we have them all.

By default, the theme is listing the wordpress blogroll, so you must go to your Widgets Area and choose what you want to show in it.

The Article’s Page

Every Article have some special goodness for you. First of all, we have some social icons, already prepared for making those vital recomm’s and spread your articles all around the net. The services covered are :

1. Twitter
2. Stumble Upon
3. Digg
4. Technorati
5. Magnolia

If you wish that I implement another social service for you, for example Facebook, you just have to ask for it.

Then we have, with a cool fade in / fade out effect (like with the social icons), the possibility to print the article, and, thanks to the Blueprint CSS framework we added to our standard styles, allow to the printer skip all of the unnecessary images that can disturb a further lecture in paper.

Third, we will find a Resume Section before the comments, where to find 5 (or more) Related Posts by Category, thanks to the super-quick plugin from the Sergej Müller lab, joining the categories the post belongs to, which will bring to their correspondent archives, as well as the tags with which the post is marked (going to the tag’s archive).

We must mention here the special layout in our archives, a true luxury in this days of the minimal design.

Finally, again in the Article’s page, we have a scroll feature, driving to the comments from the top part of the article, and restoring the user to the top once he/she arrives at the end.

A smooth movement, installed thanks to jQuery (and which quickness will be in relation with the amount of written material you have in the post), will bring the user avid of comments to the so-wanted debate.

Well, and what more ?

There’s more. Functions.php, one of the theme’s files, will protect your site from a major range of attacks just deleting the version of WordPress you are running, and which hackers need, in order to do their bad things. We will found there also (in functions.php) a little bit of code implementing the same size for all your words whether you install a Tag Cloud.

I can mention too the custom excerpts in the featured section, which have no brackets “[...]” at the end, and the wonderful set of Coquette Icons courtoisie of Dry Icons directly for you.

We won’t forget neither the Current Date and custom message in the footer !

And … if you have some ideas, which could convince you to ask for the theme, don’t hesitate it ! Use the comment form below.

Cordially,

Ignacio

Credits :

• Coquette Icons, several series
• jQuery, our Smooth Operator
• Local Scroll jQuery Plugin, our second Smooth Operator too
• The super-quick Related Posts by Category, by Sergej Müller.