CREATE AN ADVANCED OPTIONS PAGE IN WORDPRESS

How To: Create a Theme Options Page for Your Wordpress Theme

A Look Into the WordPress Themes’ Options Pages

10+ RARE WORDPRESS THEME OPTIONS PAGE TUTORIALS TO GET YOU STARTED

Are 100% free for personal or commercial use, since they’re released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You don’t have to pay me (or anyone else) anything to use them, regardless of what you want to use them for.
Are tableless and fully standards compliant.
Only use royalty-free, public domain stock photos from PDPhoto.org.
Are completely ready to use with WordPress. Just drop them in and go!

I’ve rounded up the best themes from freewpthemes.net. Just click on the images to get full previews and click on Download to save the themes you like. Enjoy!

Spanning

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passageway

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conjuction

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The theme has a simple horizontal navigation and absolutely no clutter or cruft to distract the eye. If you want your visitors to read your words, this is a theme that will help achieve that goal.

The main body text is justified, and the footer features elegant links to the site owner’s social media identities.

Demo and download:

Demo
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The theme has light text on a dark background, stylish and very legible typography, and a simple footer to display categories and information about the site.

As the theme author puts it: “Vostok is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.”

Demo and download:

Demo
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WordPress Widgets (WPW) is like a plugin, but designed to provide a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content (known as “widgets”) without having to change any code. The Widgets SubPanel explains how to use the various Widgets that come delivered with WordPress, and the Widgets page at Automattic explains how to ‘widgetize’ themes and plugins.

• Using Text Widgets
• Using RSS Widgets
• Widget-ready themes

Great How to Build a Widget Tutorial from LonewolfDesigns

How to make a WordPress Widget from Scratch

Resources

Notepad 1.2 is just released (added theme options). Now you add custom favicon, exclude page(s), disable dropdown menu, edit or turn off social media buttons, and add footer tracking code via the option page. Big thanks to Jon Raasch for coding the option page. Also, all strings in the theme files are replaced with l10n (edited by Jerome Neuveglise).

Demo

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Basic Features

• 4 Color Schemes – Shades of Grey, Thrilling Orange, Black & White, Icy Blue
• Search Engine Optimized
• Customize your header with your own logo & snapshot image!
• Auto-sized featured images & thumbnails
• Easy integration with Twitter, Flickr & Facebook
• Tabbed features/popular posts & more in the sidebar
• Integration with FeedBurner email subscriptions
• 125×125 and 300×250 ad management
• Blog category dropdowns
• 3 widget-ready sidebar areas
• Built-in support for WordPress Related Posts
• WP 2.7+ nested comments!
• Gravatar support in comments
• Compressed CSS & minified JavaScript for faster load time
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap & photo galleries
• Easy customization with the integrated theme options page
• Totally FREE for commercial & individual use

Are you ready to Thrillify your blog?

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Easily-Customizable Header

ThrillingTheme comes with an attractive, two-tone title font by default, or you can upload your own custom logo image. Additionally, if you want your own polaroid photo, upload any image to your Media Library, copy/paste the URL and ThrillingTheme automatically resizes, crops & frames your photo snapshot!

Social Media Integration

We’re all about the social media profiles around here! And we make it easy to integrate your latest Twitter updates, recent Flickr photos, and even insert a link to your Facebook group or fan page. The ThrillingTheme sidebar comes with pre-designed widgets for your RSS & email subscriptions, advertisements, Twitter, Flickr & more. One note: while there is widget support, these custom widgets are all hard-coded into the sidebar (in the most effective order I’ve found after 3 years of experimentation) so you’ll need to open up sidebar.php if you want to re-organize things.

Encouraging Readers to Engage

We’ve also optimized your post meta to keep visitors on your website longer and encourage them to share on social bookmarking sites. Single post pages come with quick submission buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon & more.  Post dates are moved to the bottom to encourage ever-green content. We’ve also built in support for the WordPress Related Posts plugin to encourage readers to dig deeper into your site.

Integrated Back-End Theme Options

The powerful admin options page allows you to make changes without editing code: add your logo, insert your own snapshot, change color schemes, easily integrate your Twitter, Flickr & Facebook profiles, add your Google Analytics tracking code, and manage your ad slots. Everything is plug-and-play!

Add Featured Photos to your Blog Posts

To display large, beautiful, preformatted feature photos on the main page, simply upload your photo to the media library, copy the full image URL and paste it in the custom “Featured Image URL” field on your Edit Post page. A script built into the theme will automatically re-size your images to 540×195 pixels for the front page and create thumbnail images for archive pages.

Custom Page Templates

The theme comes with three preformatted custom page templates: an image gallery template, and sitemap and archives page templates for beautifully laid-out, quick links to all of your static pages, chronological & categorical archives.

Cross-Browser Compatible

I’ve tested ThrillingTheme thoroughly to make it play nice with all major web browsers including Firefox 2+, Safari 2+, Internet Explorer 7+, Opera 9+, and Google Chrome. It has limited but functional compatibility with IE6, and even asks visitors to upgrade, if you want to encourage better web browsing like I do (you can turn this nag off if you like).

WordPress Compatibility

ThrillingTheme has been tested on Wordpress version 2.5 and up. I’m willing to bet it is compatible with older versions, but for best results (and the most secure blog installation) it’s best to upgrade to at least Wordpress 2.8. 

ThrillingTheme Details:

Demo: ThrillingTheme demo
Release date: October 28, 2009
Developer: Cody McKibben
Theme Type: Personal Blog, Travel Blog

Installation:

1. Install marahan folder at /wp-content/themes/
2. Activate Marahan Theme 1.0 by Padd Solutions (Note: Don’t worry if it might look disoriented at first, you need to activate the required plugins to fully utilize the theme.)

Activate the Required Plugins

• Popularity Contest
• TweetMeme Retweet Button (note on the settings, see below)

Customizing Marahan Options:

1. Go to Appearance > Marahan Options
   • General Settings
   • Page Tracker Settings
   • Social Networking Settings
   • Related Posts Settings
   • Page Navigation Settings
   • Custom Ads Settings
2. Then Save Settings.

Additional Customization:

• Changing the Logo:
  1. Use the site-name.psd found at the /images folder.
  2. Edit it using your favorite graphics application.
  3. Save as site-name.png and upload it at the /wp-content/themes/marahan/images folder.
• Using TweetMeme:
  1. Go to TweetMeme settings
  2. Display: check “Display the button on pages”
  3. Position: Manual.
  4. Type: choose “The compact widget”
  5. The rest of the settings can be left as is.
  6. Save changes.
• Updating the Featured Content Gallery:
  1. At the Custom Field post:
  2. Name: paddimage-gallery
  3. Value: url of the image (i.e. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/image.jpg)
  4. Edit the settings.
  5. Save changes.
• Updating the Post Thumbnail:
  1. At the Custom Field of the post:
  2. Name: paddimage
  3. Value: url of the image (i.e. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/image.jpg)
  4. Edit the settings.
  5. Save changes.

Thank you:

Thanks to Crowd Favorite and TweetMeme for the useful plugins and Woofunction for their amazing icons. This theme is also brought to you by Cheap Hosting from the #1 Web Hosting Provider – HostNexus.

Demo

Download

Installation:

1. Install masipag folder at /wp-content/themes/
2. Activate Masipag Theme 1.0 by Padd Solutions (Note: Don’t worry if it might look disoriented at first, you need to activate the required plugins to fully utilize the theme.)

Activate the Required Plugins

• FlickrRSS
• Popularity Contest
• TweetMeme Retweet Button (note on the settings, see below)
• Twitter For WordPress
• WP-Pagenavi

Customizing Masipag Options:

1. Go to Appearance > Masipag Options
   • General Settings
   • Social Networking Settings
   • Related Posts Settings
   • Custom Ads Settings
2. Then Save Settings.

Additional Customization:

• Changing the Logo:
  1. Use the site-name.psd found at the /images folder.
  2. Edit it using your favorite graphics application.
  3. Save as site-name.png and upload it at the /wp-content/themes/masipag/images folder.
• Changing the Site Description:
  1. Use the site-description.psd found at the /images folder.
  2. Edit it using your favorite graphics application.
  3. Save as site-description.png and upload it at the /wp-content/themes/masipag/images folder.
• Using TweetMeme:
  1. Go to TweetMeme settings
  2. Display: check “Display the button on pages”
  3. Position: Manual.
  4. Type: choose “The compact widget”
  5. The rest of the settings can be left as is.
  6. Save changes.
• Updating the Featured Content Gallery:
  1. At the Custom Field post:
  2. Name: paddimage-gallery
  3. Value: url of the image (i.e. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/image.jpg)
  4. Edit the settings.
  5. Save changes.
• Updating the Post Thumbnail:
  1. At the Custom Field of the post:
  2. Name: paddimage
  3. Value: url of the image (i.e. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/image.jpg)
  4. Edit the settings.
  5. Save changes.
• Updating the Flickr Stream:
  1. Go to Settings > FlickrRSS
  2. Update the display and User ID settings
  3. Save settings.
• Customizing the “About Us” in the footer:
  1. Go to Appearance > Mayumi Options
     • General Settings > Site Description
     • Use this code: < img src="%THEME_URL%/images/icon-padd.jpg" style="float: left; border: 5px solid #666; margin: 0 10px 0 0"/> Text follows ...

Thank you:

Thanks to Eightface, Crowd Favorite, Lester, Rick and TweetMeme for the useful plugins; and Woofunction for their amazing icons.

Demo
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