Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
What’s new with the Elemental WordPress theme?
Elemental is the upcoming theme framework for Pro Theme Design. It’s been in development for absolutely ages, and the code is really showing it’s maturity, and I am really pleased with the possibilities it opens up.
The focus when developing Elemental has been to keep things as straight forward and easy to use as possible. The code is simple and minimal, and the features have all been chosen to reduce the requirements of third party plugins incorporating many of the most common requests and changes you see mentioned across the web.
The development and features of Elemental have mostly been driven by my own needs and desires. I created a theme that I would want to use, and it is now the theme that I use to power this blog.
Stats
Currently Elemental has:
- Custom Widgets: 11 – there are a variety of widgets I would like to include in WordPress (by default) and these 11 are the ones I think people will be most interested in.
- Filter Hooks: 31 – to ease theme development and customisation through child themes, Elemental has a whole stack of hooks
- Action Hooks: 15+ – as above, there are a variety of action hooks inserted into Elemental, all used to ease integration of new functionality
- Custom page templates: 12 – I have tried to create all the page templates the average blogger would need
New features
There are too many new features to mention but some of the highlights include:
- SEO optimized – this is a “feature” many themes tout, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, and we’ve been very careful to make Elemental as friendly to the search engines as possible
- Automated post thumbnails – We started the automated thumbnail fashion with Mimbo Pro, and now we want to take it one step further. The new code was actually implemented in Mimbo Pro 2, and essentially it removes the need to use custom fields to save thumbnail image properties.
- Full WordPress mu support – Related to the above point, Elemental will be the first theme to support WordPress mu, and thumbnail resizing, out of the box. I should point out that I will happily share the code with everyone once it’s been fully tested.
- Custom 404 responses – 404’s have been taken to the next level. The page has
- Custom Body Class system – WordPress recently introduced the new body_class function, and Elemental uses this, but we have also added some more classes to add that extra level of style customisation.
- Single post templates – many themes have custom page templates, but none have custom post templates – until now. Elemental offers the chance to have different layouts for your blogs posts, as well as your stand alone pages.
@Ben It sounds even more promising than before. Having a robust framework with a lifecycle leave us with focus on the Child Theme on top. Easy upgrades and maintenance makes the administration minimal and thus leaves more time for content.
Thumbs up so far!
Hi Reinar – thanks for the comments 🙂
Your thoughts match mine. The better the framework the less work the themes that live on top of it have to do. Hopefully it will give us lots of scope to do cool new things.
Looks nice! The last month or so I’ve jumped on the framework bandwagon too and having just releasing Biblioteca, I’m even more on the bandwagon. Elemental looks to be the framework plugging the gap between developer’s framework and designer’s framework which the community really needs!
Hey Alex – I saw Biblioteca pop up in my feed reader just now actually. I’m going to have to download it and see if there are any juicy parts I can “borrow” 🙂
Don’t look too closely 😛 if there’s an inefficient way of doing something, I’m doing it! The in-post options are pretty awesome (ie here, tut this).
Looks great Ben, and thanks for sharing the WPMU code for thumbnails. I’m presuming it’s a fix to timthumb.php right?
Hey Magnus – thanks for the comment 🙂
The fix for WPMU is actually changing the embed url so that it points to the correct place. WPMU using rewrite rules to hide the file path makes it next to impossible for TimThumb to find the files. I am still testing to make sure it works but I hope to publish my findings in the next week or two.
could you elaborate on that?
want to use it with WPMU…
Hi – I actually posted an article on making TimThumb work with WordPress mu a few weeks ago.
Looks great and functional.
thanks Marc – I hope people agree when it’s released 🙂
Just noticed the quiet launch of Elemental. The page isn’t working for me. Don’t know why?
Yeah – IE8 has gone horribly wrong. Not sure why, we’re looking into it now.
I guess it’s IE8, why the demo isn’t working at this moment.
Same here – in IE8. The header container right, but the second level of the page navigation folds out around the Cat navigation. The sidebars are pushed below the content.
But! It looks grrreat Ben. I’m ready to invest…
Yeah – there were some issues with IE8, so we took it off sale again 🙂
Fortunately the extra time has given us some other things to polish so it’s looking better than ever now! Should be ready again soon (today with any luck)
Hi Ben, this one sounds good, i love the “SEO optimized” and “Automated post thumbnails” features. Btw, is this free or premium theme?
Hi – Thanks for the kind comments, this is going to be a premium theme
Ben, if I look at the Twitpic http://twitpic.com/e5a88 from Darren I see some functionalities like featured content, community tweet widgets etc. Is this allready incorporated? The use of multiple columns on the frontpage is also something I can’t figure out.
Hi Marc – the screenshot you linked too is actually for what will be the first Elemental Child Theme, and is not for Elemental itself. The theme you linked is called The Local and is a hyper local theme for WordPress. It will include about half a dozen additional widgets.
If anyone here is reading this then you can now check out Elemental on Pro Theme Design here.
Got it! Practicing on reinar-svendsen.dk and look forward to some inspirational “child themes” along the lines with Mimbo Pro.
The options are fantastic and enables absolute flexibility – Elemental seems to be in a league of its own!
Tnx Ben for the reaction. Is there a timeframe for publishing the child theme(s)?
No definite time but we will probably publish The Local in the first half of next month
I downloaded the elemental theme for our blog, but can’t forget how to change the header. We have some images with our title that we want to use, but how do you change the header?
Hi Jamey – I think I will write a tutorial on this as I can see why people would find it confusing
Sorry to ask again. But is there any more news about the Local child theme? Maybe a screenshot?
It’s great that you’re still interested in it 🙂 Looks like we missed the last deadline (which is why we don’t do deadlines). I’m not going to promise anything but it’s coming really really soon!
thank you
just tried the suggestions over there (http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2009/10/timthumb-wordpress-mu/)
and posted a question.
looks like it am getting closer…..
Nice theme I’m gonna use it on my next site. I loved the layout and design of the site. Share it to each other is my current website and I am constantly conscious of it’s design factor.