Ataraxis literally means “absence of mental stress or anxiety” . And that is exactly what this beautiful WordPress theme does !The Ataraxis is a nature-themed two-column 800px wide WordPress theme with widgetised sidebar , Cufon text-image replacement for headers ,
jQuery tooltips on links ,Rotating headers , Custom logos , reply/quote feature on comments , collapsible widgets , built-in social bookmarks on posts and many other features.
The Ataraxis Features
- 800px wide
- Two-columns with left sidebar
- Cufon text-image replacement for headings
- 4 different nature-themed header backgrounds
- Collapsible widgets
- Sutured Javascript for faster loading
- jQuery animated tooltips on links ( use the title attribute)
- Reply/Quote feature on comments
- Zebra stripped and Admin highlighted comments
- Custom logo support
- Search Engine Optimized
- Smooth scrolling for internal links
- Custom description in footer for better SEO
- Builtin social bookmarking for 6 most common sites
- Ability to add custom CSS from theme options page without having to edit the stylesheet
- Google Analytics integration
- Displays a browser warning to IE 6 users
- CSS 3 curved border and text-shadow effects
- Easy to customize and clean CSS
- Some custom CSS classes that you can use in posts :
- .highlight , .note
- .warning , .error
- .download ( use on <a> )
- .frame ( us on images to give them a silvery frame )
- Around a dozen theme options
Download The Ataraxis v1.0
Well, this is my first guest post at DG…let’s start out with something useful in WordPress…
Sometime ago, I had to add a “homepage-only” link on my WP Blog, that would appear only on the Homepage of the blog and no where else. There isn’t any such option in WP so I tried out some googling to get a solution for it 
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Just finished a complete re-design of this site, this time i decided to choose light colors. The homepage now features a “featured posts” slider and an ad box. Comments are jazzed up with “Reply” and “Quote” buttons (how i did them? coming soon…!) . Let me know in the comment below what you think about the new design.
Scenic Sanity is yet another free gorgeous wordpress theme from dynamicguru.com licensed under GPL. It is a light color variant of my previous theme “The Last fall” .It has two-columns , a widgetized left-sidebar and gravtar integrated comments , ideal for personal weblogs . Some of the cool features include :
- Cufon text-image replacement for headers
- jquery hover effects on links in the sidebar
- Rounded corners in FireFox and Safari
- Excerpt based homepage
- Collapsible left sidebar widgets
- Sleek styles for the Calendar widget
Download Scenic Sanity 1.1
“Featured Posts” are a key feature of any news/journal wordpress site. It is pretty easy to develop a wordpress theme to display a fixed number of featured posts from a specific category on the homepage. It can be done using the query_posts() function of wordpress. Here are few lines of code that displays latest 10 posts from the news category , you can edit it to tailor to your needs.
<?php
/* Name of your category you want to show posts from */
$cat =
"news";
/* No. of posts to display*/
$num = "10";
?>
<!– Show x Posts from $cat category–>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=’.$num.‘&category_name=’.$cat.”);
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content(‘Continue…’); ?>
<p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> <?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" class="permalink">Link to this article</a>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
The function query_posts(); can be used to control which posts are displayed in the loop. More information on using query_posts(); can be found here : http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts .
