Regulus – New WordPress Theme released

Regulus has it’s own theme page here

Towards the end of the Bubble Blitz development I started work on my first WordPress theme. The making of it kind of stopped and started for quite a while since there were things I wanted to do that I couldn’t.

The idea behind the theme was to create a very simple to customise theme for the novice blogger. One of the problems with Kubrick is that it’s the default theme for WordPress but it is not straight forward to edit; therefore many sites use the default layout and don’t change anything. I wanted something that looked equally nice but could be changed easily so that there aren’t hundreds of sites out there using a single theme that look identical. Obviously I don’t expect there to be hundreds of sites using Regulus since it’s never going to be the default theme, but I figured I would make things easy to change anyway.

Regulus Admin panel#

The main new feature that isn’t hugely common (and the reason it took a while to complete) is an admin panel built into the WordPress admin system that let’s you edit the layout of the site without actually changing any code. To do this I used the wonderful WordPress Theme Toolkit, developed by Ozh, from Planet Ozh.

The admin panel let’s you edit the content of the sidebar so that you can show and hide the things you want to see. You also have the option to change the header graphic, and edit the colour scheme of the site. These edits are hard coded into the site but if (when?) I create another theme I think I will attempt to make it even easier to change things so you can use any colour scheme or graphics that you chose. Obviously more advanced users can change the colours themselves, but they’re not who this theme is aimed at (they’re welcome to use it if they want though 🙂 ).

Regulus Plugins#

I also built in support for a number of plugins developed by other WordPress developers. These plugins have been included in the core theme code so that no additional downloads are required. The plugins I used were:

• WordPress Admin Bar 2 – by Matt Read (his website appears to be down at the moment but I’ll leave this in case it comes back online)
• the_excerpt Reloaded – by Kaf Oseo
• Author Highlight – by Jonathan Leighton

These are all plugins I use here, on Binary Moon, and I really like them so figured I should include them as standard. I changed the plugin names so that if you already have any of them installed there should be no clashes.

How do you get it…?#

The good stuff

• Regulus Live Preview on Binary Moon
• Download Regulus Theme for WordPress

Known Problems#

The only bug I’m aware of is that in Internet Explorer (damn you IE) the label ‘message’ is listed twice when it should only appear once (it’s only in the code once…). If anyone has any idea why this happens I’d love to hear from you.

Anything else?#

Since this is my first WordPress theme I’m pretty confident that there are things I have forgotten, or not done, so I will no doubt release a few updates in the next week or two. Let me know if there are any problems and I will do my best to fix them.