Juicy Theme for WordPress

Juicy is a bright, summery theme with much orangey goodness. Possibly also suitable for blogs about smoothies. Yum.

Download →

Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge), or just try out the demo.

So what’s exciting and shiny?

• Tell people how great you are
  You can add an about box to the top of the home page to tell visitors a bit about your site, encourage them to subscribe or just show off your favourite cat pictures.
• Search engine optimised
  While it won’t do nearly as much as writing good, linkable content, Juicy has some basic SEO features that should help search engines rank you and search users click through. Post and page titles are displayed before your blog name in the window title, and search terms make their way up to the title bar too. It’s also possible to add a meta description tag to your homepage via the theme options. If you want even more control, you may wish to check out the All in One SEO Pack plugin.
• Interesting archives
  The standard WordPress archives are pretty ugly, and have more than a whiff of mystery meat about them. Juicy does somewhat better, showing some sample posts from each category or month to pique your visitors’ interest.
• Add a sitemap
  Juicy includes a template to add a sitemap of every post and page on your blog. Useful for visitors and for Google too.
• Custom sidebars for each post
  You can customise individual posts or pages by hiding stuff in the sidebar, or even the whole sidebar. This may be useful if you want some extra width for photos, have a short page or don’t want people getting distracted on your buy page.
• Make it look nice
  Juicy supports some fairly standard classes to make your posts look pretty. Images can be placed on the left or right of text, or centred on the page by applying the classes Left, Right and Center respectively (the Kubrick alignleft, alignright and centered will work too). You can also add a border with, um, Border. If you sometimes create lists with entries that run to several lines then you may be interested in the Paras class, which adds a bit more space between the list items.
• Easy to customise
  I’ve tried to avoid duplication of code as much as possible, so if you want to change something (perhaps add another site to the share links, or change the ‘keep reading’ text) you should only have to do it in one place. Most of the these helper functions are in juicy.php.

Download →

Installing the theme

• Upload the juicy folder in the zip file to your themes folder (probably /wordpress/wp-content/themes).
• Upload the just-jquery folder to your plugins folder (optional but recommended).
• In your WP admin panel, select the Juicy theme and (optionally) activate the Just jQuery plugin.

Using custom sidebars

The sidebar changes you can make are per-post customisations. To use them, just enter the keys below into the post’s custom fields section. I’d suggest using true as the key’s value, though anything you enter should work nicely.

The odd one out is the sidebar_text option, which allows you to enter arbitrary text into the sidebar. HTML is allowed (and encouraged actually, as it’ll look pretty ugly otherwise). Enter your text as the key’s value.

• no_sidebar¹ – Hide the sidebar
• sidebar_text – Insert some text into the sidebar
• no_about – Hide the about box in the sidebar
• no_lists¹ – Hide all lists in the sidebar
• no_post_list¹ – Hide the recent post list
• no_popular_list – Hide the popular posts list (created by the Popularity Contest plugin)
• no_blogroll¹ – Hide the blogroll
• no_archives¹ – Hide the blog archives list

¹ Works with widgets too.

JavaScript magic

Juicy uses the wonderful jQuery to sprinkle some magic pixie dust here and there. The theme works fine without jQuery, but works even better with it. Quite a few WordPress plugins use jQuery or other JavaScript libraries, and unfortunately they can interfere with each other with sometimes hard-to-diagnose results.

In an effort to reduce confusion and library duplication somewhat, Juicy does not include jQuery itself. The theme download contains a small plugin called Just jQuery that you can use to add jQuery to your site if you don’t have a copy already. There’s more info about it on the Just jQuery page.

Compatibility and support

Juicy should work with WordPress 2.1 onwards. I’ve tested it with PHP 4 and 5 and on Apache and IIS. I’ve also used MySQL 4.1, 5, 5.1 and 6 with no issues. If it doesn’t work for you for some reason then I will try to help, though bear in mind this is free software and I have other things to do too. If you find a specific problem with the theme (and better yet a solution too) then please let me know and I’ll be very grateful.

Legal mumbo jumbo

Juicy is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. You can read all about it here, but basically it means you can use it, copy it, distribute it and make your own version of it, so long as you acknowledge the source (leave the link in the footer alone) and, if you change stuff and release your own version, you do so under the same licence.

The exception to this is the orange slice picture, which is not mine. If you want to use that in your own derivative work, you’ll need to buy a licence from Stockxpert or iStockPhoto.