WP CODA and CODA BLUE have been amazing successes, but they aren’t without their flaws. They’re very limited in the type of content they can display and how they can display it, they have trouble displaying specific types of content properly, things tend to “break” easily with them and you need to understand a little coding to customize them. They’re both over a year old now and I’ve put that added experience and all that user feedback into WP SLIDER, which is an amazing theme.

WP SLIDER takes the idea behind the coda themes and improves upon them in every way using the hundreds of user feedback comments I received and the experience I’ve gained along the way. The biggest change is that WP SLIDER can display any type of wordpress content, in any way you want using the included plugin. Every aspect and element of WP SLIDER can be customized or turned off. Gone are the days of having to open a theme file to make changes. Of course, the html and css are as easy to read and customize as ever WP SLIDER is just more accessible. In fact, you can disable the sliding feature altogether if you like.

I could easily set up a dozen demo sites using this theme to show you all the ways it can be customized, but I’m far too excited to spend any more time setting up demo’s. If you have a question that starts with “can WP SLIDER …”, the answer is yes.

Pages you should take a look at:
Archive Page
Article including all kinds of markup and a gallery
Article Comments
Article Reply
Image / Attachment with the advanced gallery disabled, this is what your user will see
Custom Login / Register / Lost Password

As you can see, everything (I think) was considered when developing this theme. And if it wasn’t, or there’s a feature you want I’ll build it for you. Why wouldn’t I? If there’s a way to improve this theme, I want to!

What could you use this theme for?
• Portfolio (art, writing, poetry, video, etc.)
• Blog
• CMS
• Business
• Commerce
• What couldn’t you use this theme for?

I could go on and on about how much I love this theme, but I’ll let it speak for itself. Scroll down for a list of some of the more important features. If you still have a question, please send me an email and I’ll respond in a timely manner.

WP SMASHING was released with a couple icon sets as well, so make sure you check them out on the WP SMASHING release post and thank Smashing Magazine for bringing you another great set of freebies.

WP SMASHING Link:

http://choicethemes.com/wordpress/wp-smashing/

WP SMASHING is completely widget-ready with 4 widget zones (3 column footer and a single column sidebar). You can choose to use the calendar on the index page or not, it’s up to you. Each day displays the titles of posts for that day. If there is more text than can fit in a calendar day you’ll see a custom scroll bar.

Also included in this theme is a simple contact form in the footer. This contact form allows people to send an email to the site administrator and makes sure the request is coming from your site and includes email validation. WP SMASHING utilizes the jGrowl plugin for jquery to offer up notices for people who have not filled out the contact form correctly. Head to the demo and play around with it to see what I mean. Or… you can remove this feature entirely.

There are a LOT of possibilities with this theme and it was great creating it for Smashing Magazine. I’ve been wanting to do a theme for them for a while now and it’s great to finally release one. So far I have tried to focus on making free themes that focus on a particular functionality. On March 1st I’ll be launching our Theme Club which will deliver a new WordPress theme every month and a bonus theme ever other month. I’m looking forward to making other exciting additions to the site as well, so check back every now and then and see what we’ve got going on.

You’re not obligated to pay anything and truth-be-told, We aren’t going to hold it against you if you don’t credit us for using one of our themes. But if you are using one of our themes and you can give back a little, we appreciate it!

I always intended on theming Choice Themes from the beginning, but you know how it goes as a designer — you never make time for your own stuff. Well, I finally made time. I did 3 themes this week: WP CALENDAR, Choice Themes and the soon-to-be-released-for-Smashing-Magazine WP SMASHING. At the time of writing there are still a few things that need to be done: The article pages have no formatting, the comments have not been put back, the footer is empty and there is no feature list for the theme pages yet. The index page and theme gallery turned out nicely though, and I expect to have the site complete this weekend.

The WP CALENDAR theme is a practice in functionality similar to the NEWS CMS theme. I wanted to see if I could make a plugin that would allow me to place posts and pages into calendar format and the result was excellent. As with the CODA series themes and pretty much ever theme I release after this, WP CALENDAR has a companion plugin required for it to function. The foundation of WP CALENDAR lends itself to any number of sites: Bands, Organizations, Churches, the list goes on and on. If you use WP CALENDAR or any of our other themes, let me know! I love seeing how they’re being used.

WP SMASHING has one of the more gorgeous designs I’ve made. It was commissioned for the ever popular Smashing Magazine and is based on WP CALENDAR for its functionality — although there are theme options to either utilize that functionality or not. I would like to release it today or tomorrow, but we’ll see. Redesigning Choice Themes wasn’t in the cards when I set out to do WP SMASHING.

I generally round these posts up with What’s Next? Well, for themes: WP SLIDER is. I’ve made a lot of progress with the WP CODA platform and the plugin to customize the theme is coming along very nicely. WP SLIDER will be released on March 1st and will mark the beginning of a once-a-month release schedule with an additional theme being released in the middle of the month every other month. I’ll also be adding a forum to the site soon as well. All in due time.

Choice Themes has grown faster than my expectations and it’s wonderful to see the site gaining popularity. I focus on pushing the limits of what WordPress was meant to do and I’ve already got a few more themes up my sleeve that I haven’t seen done before so stay tuned and check back often!

This Thursday or Friday we’ll be releasing a theme for Smashing Magazine called WP SMASHING (original, right?) that utilizes this calendar functionality and kicks it up a notch. Time permitting — I’m extraordinarily busy this week — I’ll build the wp-calendar plugin to be a bit more robust with options on where and how to implement the calendar, so stay tuned!

News CMS uses quite a few plugins, but I’ve included them in the download to make life a little easier for you. This theme still functions without any of them, but I strongly recommend you install them as the site functions much more like a news site with their aid.

What’s Next?
I’m working a premium theme called WP Slider that takes the best aspects of WP CODA and ads all the standard functionality we’ve discussed putting into CODA BLUE but didn’t get the chance to. If I can, I’ll release WP Slider and then release a Christmas theme for it.

Follow us on Twitter to get more Choice Themes info! or use our Twitter RSS Feed.

Update: To stop receiving email updates, see the Choice Themes FAQ.

WP CODA has been a tremendous hit. While I no longer have the intention of continuing development with WP CODA – at the request of Panic! – I wanted to release CODA BLUE and the accompanying PSD as promised. This will be the last CODA release that mimics the Coda site functionality. While I may use some of the techniques used in this theme again, I will not be duplicating the functionality of the Coda site so closely.

So what’s next?

I developed this cms/news theme nearly a year ago and never used it. I need to update it to be used with WordPress 2.5+ and write a unified plugin to make installation easier, but it’s a complete CMS theme in a news-site format. The purpose behind this theme is to offer a very basic-but-clean cms/news theme that is easy to customize.

I’ll also be re-designing, or rather, designing Choice Themes to serve as a wordpress theme site so keep a look out!