Amazing Grace
Amazing Grace is a lightweight, super-optimized Wordpress theme packed with features. It uses 3 column layout for maximum accessibility and small digital footprint for minimum bandwidth usage and loading times.
Download Amazing Grace v1.2 | Live Demo
Play the music while you read
Features
- Modern styled, 3 columns, Photo-friendly, Widget ready
- Valid XHTML/CSS document
- Optimized for speed and loading time, no javascript usage
- Out of box full SEO optimization including titles and page headings
- Out of box Social networking support
- Multi pages widget
- Chunk long urls in comments
- Redirects Google image searches to your site for better exposure
- Customized 404 page
- Access to admin menu from home page (click on blog description)
- Adsense ready
- Plus much more…
Few words on the theme
The name comes from a popular tune called Amazing Grace. It is my favorite tune and it exactly describes how I feel about this theme. Find more about this beautiful song in Amazing Grace Lyrics, Chords and Movie.
When a theme is in question, I prefer ease of use and speed above everything else. That is why Amazing Grace uses optimized images, excerpts on home page (it helps generate more page views too), no javascript and “you can’t miss ‘em” navigation menus.
Additionally, I have fully optimized the theme for SEO so you do not have to worry about it. Just write your best stuff and the theme will take care of everything else.
Social bookmarks include Digg and del.icio.us only. I believe that these two together with Stumbleupon are the most significant today. Cluterring your posts with more then two usually results in user not clicking on either. Btw. you do not need a button for stumble, as 99.9% of SU users use their toolbar, so that’s one button less to worry about.
Regarding design, I have hired a very talented designer called Magnus Jepson who did the initial design. I have taken it from there and after few months the theme came to it’s final representation.
Installation & Usage
- Unpack this archive in your wp-content/themes/ directory.
- Go to Admin WordPress and select presentation.
- Select Amazing Grace
- You can also use Theme Test Drive plugin to see how the theme looks with your content before going live with it
Customization
Everyone has a different taste and there are couple of easy customization changes you can do to change Amazing Grace to suit your needs.
- Change the colors - You can download Amazing Grace psd file and change the graphics to your liking
- Adding rotating images in header
- Create images you want to rotate and put them in your images/folder under the names bg-portait1.png, bg-portait2.png and so on.
- Open your style.css and remove background reference from #portrait-bg section
- Enter this code in your header.php just below the stylesheet line (one beginning with link rel=”stylesheet”)
<style type="text/css">
#portrait-bg { background: url(<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/bg-portrait<?php echo (rand()%69); ?>.jpg); }
</style>- Replace “69″ with your maximum picture number
- Show full posts - If you want full posts and not excerpts appearing on your home page, archives and search results, you need to modify index.php, archive.php and search.php and replace all occurrences of “the_excerpt” with “the_content” and remove the neighboring code with Continue reading (everything up to ‘}’ sign)
- Display categories - Theme will display five categories by default. If you have more then this, edit header.php, find wp_list_categories and add change the number. However this may cause your categories to overflow to new line so you may want to use exclude parameter to exclude some of the categories
- Pages to top of menu - If you want to add pages to top menu (About, Contact, Site map like n my blog) open header.php, find “//wp_list_pages” and remove “//”. You may want to edit “include=” to include only pages you want to be displayed
- Email field in comments - Read this first: No more email address in comments. If you still wish to move email field, you can do it by editing comments.php
- No Social bookmark buttons - If you do not want social bookmarks button to appear (by default delicious and digg), open function.php, find “//return;” and remove “//”.
- Different Social bookmark sites - It is little trickier but generally can be done by changes in functions.php and in style.css. You will need some icons too.
- Icons/smilies getting a grey border - The issue occurs because of styles added to entry image posts (big ones :) So you might play with removing padding, margin and border commands from “.entry img” section of stylesheet (style.css) to get results you want.
Changelog
- Feb 19th, 2008 V1.2: Fixed search issue, changed stylesheet to reflect recent changes on the blog
- Jan 18th, 2008 v1.1: Added hover background for entry links; fixed footer link colors; maximum of five categories displayed by default; category drop down boxes styled
- Jan 13th, 2008 v1.0: Initial release
License
Amazing Grace theme is released under GPL License.
You may freely remove footer links if they bother you.
Reviews
- Very nice review by Ryan of Theme Playground
- Jaypee gave it a thumbs up at Jaypee Online
Services
I can offer services for any WordPress theme optimization and customization to suit your needs. See my WordPress services.
Mark, thanks for your compliments and stop by if you have some questions regarding the theme.
Dear Vladimir,
Thanks for a really nice and functional theme. I am a complete newby to WordPress and blogging in general. Your theme was very easy to set up and your instructions very helpful. Congratulations for an excellent contribution.
Samulli: Happy to help!
Thank you, Matt, that solved the problem.
And thanks for the link to that plugin. It is such a relief to not having to look into phpMyAdmin anymore each time I needed to find out a category- or page-ID. :-)
Samulli:
First, download and install the pluging Reveal IDS for WP 2.5 Admin, available here:http://www.schloebe.de/wordpress/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25-plugin/#english
This will make life a lot easier because it will reveal the ID numbers you need to make include= and exclude= work.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to Manage Pages. You will now see the ID numbers of each page. Simple list the numbers of the pages you want included after include= (but before the &) to show the ones you want. For example, to include the pages with ID numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8, you would have “include=1,2,3,5,8″.
Hope that helps.
Vladimir,
thank you for this amazing theme. I think it is one of the best free themes I have found so far and I will soon implement it on my blog.
For the moment I am still customizing it on my testblog - thanks also for your customization tips, they have helped me a great deal. :-)
I only ran into two little problems so far:
1. I have implemented the rotating images and while it works fine most of the time, sometimes no image at all appears when I load the page. Do you have any idea what could be the reason for that? It’s not really a big deal, since the header works just as well without an image (it just looks a bit empty), I’m just curious as to how that could happen.
2. I have several pages on my blog, but I want only 6 of them to appear in the top row of the header. At the moment I have managed to hide the others by assigning them a lower rank (they are all nested under my About page). And while that works for the header, it looks kind of strange when I list all of the pages in the sidebar. How exactly do I have to edit the “include=” section to list only the ones I want to see? (Sorry if that is a dumb question, but I have no clue about PHP) ;-)
Thanks for the kind words, they are the best donation to me.
I am glad that this theme still has so many followers.
Take care!
Vladimir,
I REALLY like your theme. Even the name (Amazing Grace) fits in PERFECTLY with my blog mission.
While the theme looks nice, has great features, and a good flow; what I really appreciate is the time you spend assisting others with your expertise so that they can take full advantage of its benefits.
At this time, my blog is still under development. Occasionally, I visit in order to get advice from you or others in the comment section regarding a coding difficulty. It’s a great resource that adds great value to your theme.
Perhaps you might want to consider putting a donate button on this page so that others can tangibly express their appreciation. You deserve it!
God Bless You Abundantly!
I have a small problem with your theme. Actually it’s a request rather than a problem. I want to use excerpt only in the homepage. I mean, the last post(so the first post in them homepage) will be shown fully and the rest will be shown as an excerpt. But in your theme when I go to second page again the first post is shown fully. I dont want it to be. So is there a way to show only the last post in homepage “full” and the rest are as excerpt.
Johnathan, I was about to answer you but that way I would deprive you of sensation of discovering, so I waited a little more ;)
Doh! , sorry guess i should have read better huh lol
I am finding one problem..
When I create new pages, they do not show up in the very top nav.. I havent edited anything, what could the problem be?
Hi Vladimir,
I’m sure it is obvious, but there isn’t an “header.jpg” in the image file. I just would like to make a few minor changes to the header graphic itself (I think I understand the photo part). Would I upload my own “header.jpg” in the image file and then make changes in the css stylesheet?
I apologize if you’ve answered this already. Thank you for your help, and again, really great theme.
Robyn
@Vladimir I tried using that highlight author’s comments plugins, but either it was ignored or the alternating formatting trumps it somehow. That link you provided looks like just the ticket, though. Thanks.