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. Now updated for WordPress 3.0 support!
Features
- Modern styled, SEO Optimized, Clean, 3 columns, Photo-friendly, Widget ready
- Valid XHTML/CSS document
- WordPress 3.0+ support (threaded comments, menu navigation system)
- Optimized for speed and loading time
- Out of box full SEO optimization including titles and page headings
- Out of box Social networking support
- Customized 404 page
- 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.
Built in social bookmarking include Digg and del.icio.us.
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.
Images
Images used in the themes are provided as example only and have been obtained through Internet wallpaper sites without any known copyright information. They may be copyrighted by their respectful owners.
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.
If you did not find what you need you can check out my WordPress Forums.
- Make sure to check the Ultimate guide to Amazing Grace, and also part 2
- Change the colors - You can download Amazing Grace psd file and change the graphics to your liking
- Adding rotating images in header (version 2.0 of the theme and up already has this implemented)
- Create images you want to rotate and put them in your images/folder under the names bg-portait1.jpg, bg-portait2.jpg 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
- Preparing rotating images - You can read this tutorial. Alternately you can download the instructions by Sven Niemetz for a more flexible solution.
- Show Full Entries/Excerpts on index page - If you want full entries replace the_excerpt() with the_content() and vice versa. Changes should be applied to index.php and archives.php
- Display categories - Theme will display four categories by default. If you have more then this, you need to edit file header.php, and find wp_list_categories (at the bottom). This function controls how your categories are shown. You can include or exclude certain categories. Full description of the command is available here.
- Display pages - Pages are displayed also in header.php. You need to find a line with wp_list_pages. This command also allows you to include and exclude pages to show and you can read full description here. Alternatively, you can remove the command and just list pages manually one by one in the same way the Home page is listed in the line above.
- Change archives and categories excerpts to full posts - Edit archive.php and change "the_excerpt" with "the_content"
- Add AdSense (or any other) ads - You can add your AdSense code to ad_middle.php. Easiest way to insert ads into sidebar is to create a text widget, paste the adsense code into it and palce it anywhere on your sidebar
- Display Social bookmark buttons - If you want to display social bookmarks buttons, edit function.php, and remove 'return;' at the beginning of the file.
- Different Social bookmark sites - It is little trickier but generally can be done by changes in functions.php. You will need some icons too.
- Download Plugins - Find out about all the plugins I use to help you customize the theme further.
Change log
- Aug 02nd, 2008, v2.4 - Compatibility with 2.6 (mostly CSS changes).
- Jul 06th, 2008 v2.0: Added many visual tweaks and gravatar support.
- 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
See my WordPress Consulting Services page for more information and rates.
664 Comments
glb,
I checked out your moose site. It's nice. I like your pictures. As for gravatar, yes, a gravatar is slightly different from an avatar. If you go to the gravatar home page, you can register and upload an avatar. Take note of the email addy you use with them. Once you do this, from then on, as long as you use the same email addy and the blog has gravatars enabled, your gravatar will automatically show up when you post. For example, as I said in my earlier reply, my gravatar shows up... I'm not actually a registered member of Vladimir's blog... but as long as I post using the same email addy that I used with gravatar, my pic shows up automatically. I don't mean to take up Vladimir's site with posts not exactly pertaining to his theme, so if you have any more questions about gravatar, feel free to email me: josey at foldsomething dot com
Hello, I am using your theme. I really like it so much! Nice work! :-)
Thank you for sharing your creations!
Oops! I have another question. I am using an animated favicon which only shows up in Firefox. They say that by using two different favicons and then putting this coded in between your head tags, the non-animated favicon will show in IE and the animated will show in any browser that supports animated favicons.
What .php page would I put this code in?
Thanks again for any help.
Thanks, Josey, for the answer to my question. As you probably can tell, I am sort of a newbie altho I have had the site for a while (just didn't do a whole lot with it). :-) I am using 2.7 and I am using the amazing grace theme so I guess I am set. Not real sure what you mean by a gravatar account. I signed up to my own blog using another name and nothing showed up where I could either put in an avatar (do avatar and gravatar mean the same thing?) I did check and my avatars are turned on in the discussion setting.
Hi Vladimir,
I'm using Amazing Grace theme. But now I would like to hide tags on my website.
Do you have any ideas about hiding tags on the blogs?
Please advise.
Jazzy.
Thanks for this great theme. I do have one question tho. How is it possible to use avatars (or maybe in this case a Gravatar??) when signing up. I can't find anyplace where someone can use their own avatar or even a default one. Thanks to anyone that can shed some light on this.
Vladimir,
I'm still loving your theme! In fact I spent a whole day modding my new SMF based forum to match your theme... it took me a whole day because I've never used SMF before.
Anyhow, I do have a quick question about Amazing Grace for WordPress... Is there a way to get rid of both side bars for only one specific page? I'd like to have a little more room on one page to display an Amazon Associates a-store on the site instead of linking to it.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer! Happy new year.
-josey
Kim: Disable wp-chunk plugin, it's already embedded in the theme
Rachel: Why don't you ask Brian. Brian hello ? :)
Ekios: Well I do not see them in my firefox if that makes you any easier :)
Ih there :)
First of all, thank you so much for this amazing theme ;) I use it from the begining of my blog, tried an amazing amount of time to use some other one but alwaaaaaays fall back into his arms ;)
But I'm having a small issue, on firefox 3 a horizontal line appears and I really don't know how she comes here or why ... you can see it here : http://ekios.free.fr/amazingbug.jpg
It's driving me nuts right now because I turn and turn and tuuuuuurn everything in every ways and I still can't figure how it comes ... :(
So if you have a few seconds for help ? :)
Thx for this theme again,
Ekios.
Finally figured how to change my photo on the header.
To view my photos changes go to http://www.iPhone16gbBuy.info.
I downloaded the tutorial from up above "Preparing rotating images" there was a note pad that helped me"
I am having a problem with the reply on my posting. There is some code at the bottom I can't get rid of it.
Anyone experienced this problem. the code appears right above the "Reply Here" box at the end of a post.
Go here to see the code: http://www.iphone16gbbuy.info/iphone/how-to-take-great-iphone-photos
Hi Veronica
You have to go to feed burner and registar. http://www.feedburner.com.
Here is the code in the header, it should look like this.
<a href="" title="">
So have you done those to things. You also have to go into setting into feed burner and put you url from feed burner into there.
Hope this helps.
I am having trouble changing the photos in the header. If you can shed some light on that.
Kim Dion
http://www.iPhone16gbBuy.com
Is there anyone that can help me with my question? If you can please help. My question is below in an earlier post. The time shows that I asked it earlier today, but in reality I asked it last night my time.
Thanks
Rachel,
...just check out the "Customization" section above. :-)
It can be easy to miss stuff that's right under your nose.
Best,
Dainis
nice themes. thanks u fery much
okay...yeah - i know there is an explanation for the question i'm about to ask on this site...and i know about 7 million people have asked about this topic...but the thing is - i changed the photos in the rotating postcard in the header on my amazing grace themed site a while back, then i updated with the new version and now i cannot figure out FOR THE LIFE OF ME how to do it again...i've reviewed the steps a million times and i am missing something...is there anywhere i can find more info on this subject? i've been looking in the forum and going thru google and i'm at a loss...i know there is some idiotic step i'm forgetting but i don't know where else to turn...
anyone...??....
anyone..??...
it would really make my new year if i could get this taken care of ;)
thanks in advance for any responses
best,
rachel
How do you edit code within the theme to get your Feedburner feed to come up when you click on the giant Feedburner RSS Icon? I've tried to figure this out on my own, and all I've done is to have No feed link show up. Not the automatically generated WordPress Feed or Feedburner's feed.
What do I do? How can I fix this?
Hi
Great Blog and I am have installed the latest file to my themes. when I try to upload the theme I get this error.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare make_chunky() (previously declared in /home/kimdion/public_html/iphone16gbbuy.info/wp-content/plugins/wp-chunk.php:28) in /home/kimdion/public_html/iphone16gbbuy.info/wp-content/themes/BlueGrace/functions.php on line 260
Can you tell me what I can do to correct the error. It wont install. I used the one click and also installed through FTS and still same error.
Thank you
Kim Dion
Finally, I found the most suitable theme for my Travel & Tourism corner. With this, I will start working on my new corner soon.
Thanks for this well-made theme.
Vlad,
Ah, I managed to ruin my WP install. Since this update came in one big list of files (completely different format). I followed the readme.txt installed it in the /themes folder (so all your files were not in a dedicated folder) When it did not work, I deleted those files....and the index.html file that needed to be there. That resulted in a White Screen of my site. I made a new empty index.html file and got the site back, but my Admin page was not accessible. So, now I have to uninstall the entire site and database and start over (I don't have enough knowledge on how to repair it) 6 weeks and dozens of set up configs down the drain because of one file and not enough instructions and proper foldering of the updated files. Arrrrgh!
Still love your site and info, but your updates need more directions.
thank you so much for this wonderful theme vladimir! I changed my theme and I'm now using it.
Vladimir, thank you for making this great theme available. I chose to use it for my first WordPress blog (using 2.7) and was so proud of myself for figuring out how to change the photos in the header, install WordPress, get the theme working and make my first post. But now I'm absolutely stumped by something that's probably simple--if you know how to do it.Here's my roadblock:
I read your instructions that the theme is designed to display 4 categories by default. I went to the Categories section of the Dashboard, found the one category that comes in the theme and changed it's name to "About," and this displays on the blog in a little tab in the header.
Then I added three new categories. These new categories are listed in the Dashboard, right under the "about" category, but they do not display on the blog. On the main page of the Dashboard, they are listed as "pending." What must I do to make them "approved" so that they show up in tabs on the header, the way "About" does?
I read all of this page you gave a link to...http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories...but being new to this, don't know how to apply it to my problem.
Thanks in advance for any advice on using this feature-packed theme!
Hi Vladimir,
Very nice theme indeed !...Thanks for your pretty good job !
got it working on my web site.
As I am using NextGen slideshows, I was wondering if there was a way to implement the NG slides in your header in lieu et place of rotating imgs ?.....
Cute.
Anyway, just figured it out --- it's a plugin issue.
Robert,
Probably just frost. You can get rid of that with an ice scraper and make sure to turn on the de-fogger on your monitor. Also, it helps to let your computer run for a while to warm up before you use it.
:-)
--Dainis