I’m releasing my magazine-style theme, Upstart Blogger Futurosity Magazine. Originally designed for one of my other blogs (Futurosity), this theme offers offers a custom home page and is multi-author ready.

IMPORTANT NOTE! THIS THEME WAS PREVIOUSLY RELEASED AS UPSTART BLOGGER ALTERA. I have been informed that the name violates a trademark held by Altera Corporation. Upstart Blogger is in no way affiliated with Altera Corporation. If you have already downloaded Upstart Blogger Altera theme, please edit footer.php to remove the Altera name. Thank you.

Note: Upstart Blogger Futurosity Magazine is WordPress 2.3 compatible. This theme does require some hand coding and hence requires some care, but there’s no reason to be afraid of using it. I thought about creating an elaborate Options page, but it’s beyond my current abilities and would hinder the flexibility of the theme. Still, don’t even think about downloading it without reading this post thoroughly.

Demo

View the demo.

Download

Download Upstart Blogger Futurosity Magazine.

You no longer have to subscribe to download this theme, but please subscribe to Upstart Blogger anyway (you can also subscribe via email). Subscribing ensures that you’ll be notified of updates and new releases.

If you use the theme and do something interesting with it, I might give you $6.95, just for the hell of it. No kidding. In fact, at the very least, I’m going to give $6.95 to the first person who is using it on their blog. Just post a comment to let me know where to have a look.

Installation

To install Futurosity Magazine:

1. Open the UpstartBloggerFuturosityMag folder, then upload the ub_futurositymag folder to your WordPress theme folder.
2. Open the plugins folder inside the UpstartBloggerFuturosityMag folder. Upload the contents to your WordPress plugins folder. Go to the Plugins tab in your WP Admin and activate the plugins.
3. To select the theme, go to the Presentations tab of your WordPress admin and select Upstart Blogger Futurosity Magazine.
4. Go to the Users tab and enter a description for yourself, which will appear under your name on single posts and on the author archive pages. If there are additional authors on your blog, have them login and add descriptions.

Upgrading From a Previous Version

If you are updating Futurosity Magazine from a previous version and have modified only the template files, you can just replace your existing style.css file with the new one in this version. If you want to add the new tags for WordPress 2.3, see the Codex on the_tags and wp_tag_cloud. It’s very easy to add these tags yourself.

If you’ve modified the style.css, you can examine the new style.css file for changes.

Change this line:

.home #content ul li.latest-excerpt{font:11px/12px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;list-style-type:none;margin:0;padding:0;width:145px;}

to this:

#content ul li.latest-excerpt{font:11px/12px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;list-style-type:none;margin:0;padding:0;width:145px;}

To fix the blockquote problem, change this:

.single .entry-content blockquote p:first-child:first-letter{color:inherit;float:none;font-size:1em;text-transform:uppercase;}
.single .entry-content blockquote p:first-child:first-line{font-variant:normal;text-transform:lowercase;}

to this:

.single .entry-content blockquote p:first-child:first-letter{color:inherit;float:none;font-size:1em;text-transform:uppercase;line-height:18px;margin-right:0;}
.single .entry-content blockquote p:first-child:first-line{font-variant:normal;text-transform:lowercase;line-height:18px;}

Modifying Futurosity Magazine

You’ll want to modify Futurosity Magazine before using it. This will require hand editing some of the template files. You can do this with any text editor, or by going to the Presentation > Theme Editor tab in your WordPress Admin.

There are comments in the template files marking areas where you can safely edit, but be careful.

To Add Thumbnails to the Home Page

1. Make sure the Get Custom Field Values is activated. This plugin is included in the theme download.
2. Go to Custom Fields under where you edit the post in your WP admin.
3. Under Add a new custom field type post-image in the Key field.
4. Enter the address for the image in the Value field. For example:
5. http://www.upstartblogger.com/images/feedbot.gif
6. Click Add Custom Field

Apple-style Search

Inside the UpstartBloggerFuturosityMag folder is a folder called applesearch. These files style the search box to give it an Apple look. Upload the contents of the applesearch folder (not the folder itself) to the root directory of your site. If you use permalinks that include subfolders, you will need to hand code the full path to your root in applesearch.js and header.php.

Plugins

Four plugins are recommended and are included. Here are the links, if you want to check that you have the latest versions:

• Get Custom Field Values
• Get Recent Comments
• Related Posts
• Random Posts

License

This WordPress theme is released under the Creative Commons Attribution v3.0, meaning you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but you should (please) keep the link back to Upstart Blogger, either in the sidebar or the footer.

History

0.1 First released 09.04.07.
0.2 Released 10.04.07. This update adds tags to make Futurosity Magazine WordPress 2.3 compatible. Tags are now displayed at the bottom of individual posts and a tag cloud is displayed at the bottom of the page. I’ve also fixed the text size of latest posts so they are consistent on the home page and individual pages, and fixed the styling of blockquotes.