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.
Features
- Modern, three columns, Photo-friendly, Widget ready, SEO friendly
- Passes xHTML/CSS validation
- Out of box full SEO optimization including titles and page headings
- Easy to add Adsense
- Optimized for speed and loading time, no javascript usage
- Adjustable rotating images in the header
- Gravatars support
- Out of box Social networking buttons
- 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)
- 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.
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.
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594 Comments
thanks for very beautiful theme
Good theme, thanks
Hi Vladimir,
I've just downloaded this wonderful theme for my new blog. Everything seems to work fine except the possibility to display full posts in categories/archives. You mentioned to edit archive.php file and use the_content instead of the_excerpt however this file is not included in the pack. Coould you please help me? Thanks!
Hi,
Can you tel me how did you change to solve this probelm?
thanks
G.
Try re-downloading the theme file, but from Blue Grace page - the comment issue should be fixed now.
Oh, that's right, the right side goes down sometimes: usually on comments page, where comments from other users are not allowed.
If you allow it, the right side is OK :-)
Hi,
How do I make my first page of my blog only have summaries instead of the full text of the blog? I have tried to change it under reader settings but it does not work. Anyone have any ideas?
Hi Everyone
I really like this theme, With the help of a friend am getting it looking more like a bridal/wedding info site, long way to go yet, I am open to any suggestions to improving the site
Thank You
Regards Dave
What do you mean by SEO friendly?
Thank you very much. all i had to do was remove the tag cloud. That was the thing that was messing me up.
Thnaks again.
@Departamentos
I solved the problem, that seems a well known issue, (check here for instace), reducing the dimension of my ADsense banner that was wider (160px)than the real dimension of right sidebar (153px)
Bye
G.
Hey you are right! IE6.0 generate bad sidebar visulization...i suppose that is, as usual with IE, a margin problem. i'll try to fix it...
You can check the visualizzation compatibility with other browser here
http://browsershots.org (seems to be a problem with IE6 and previous only)
bye
G.
Great theme.
How do I unsubscribe from email notification of these comments though?
I t is really a beautiful theme. I just have one question. In IE6 the right side bar doesn't show where it is supposed to. If the article is long it shown beneath the left side bar. If the article is short it shows up beneath the rticle on the left side. I would like to know your comments on it.
Thank you very much
Oops let me try that again
Aurelien
I posted the following into the Single Post template:
You can see it in action on my site - just click on any of the names in the directory on the front page.
Hi Vladimir
Thank you for your great theme. I'm using it on my blog. The 2nd method for rotating pictures in the header is MUCH easier (with a transparent frame), why not integrating it in the next version??
I have a question: why isn't there, and how can I add, navigation links to next&previous posts on an post page? since posts are displayed by date, it would make sense to be able to go back in time to previous articles without going back to the home page. I have unsuccessfully tried to copy/paste the div for navigation which can be found in index.php... but it gives me a   only :(
Thanks for your help !
It seems that the code already supports the display of unlimited categories in the header, but it is the CSS that limits what can be shown. http://www.yourliferegained.com has 8 top level categories, but only 6 of them are showing. If you look carefully at the header, you can see that there is possibly a second row of boxes under the first one, but it does not display properly.
I also fixed index.php to display the excerpt on the front page, category pages, index pages, and search results while showing the full text on single post/page pages:
<?php the_tags( 'Keywords: ', ', ', ''); ?>
Yes you can, Dainis!
1. Open page.php
2. Put on the top:
3. Save it as checker.php (your new template)
4. Go to admin area - edit page: time-zone-checker
Choose Checker as a template
Because the get_sidebar code is located on the top of footer.php you will need to do another footer...
1. Open footer.php
2. Delete this line:
3. Save it footer.php as footer_checker.php
4. Now go to checker.php and delete the last line:
5. Put in that place:
Here you can get more information:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages
Hi,
Is there a way for me to make either a custom template for a specific post of page, so that I can move the sidebars out of the way (not even have them) on a page like this one:
http://curetinnitus.org/community/time-zone-checker/
See how the map overlaps with the sidebars?
Best,
Dainis
PS-Landry: I posted on the forum about this, maybe we can get together on the dynamic menu thing! :-)
Hi Vlado, I still love my Amazing Grace theme but was distressed to notice today, that my page names in my sidebar and post names in my index have all turned blue! I can't work out what has happened unless it has to do with me recently upgrading SEO Title Tags. Any ideas?
Hi, Your theme is really very Graceful.
Congrats
a very nice theme, I've needed a german translation for my . Perhaps You could an seperate language-file in the next theme? Thanks for creation.
I really like the AG theme. It's clean, fast and tidy.
Would like to know if the default settings are 2 columns v. 3 columns as my Blog site only shows the 1 right column, not 2 like yours?
Also, would like to know where in the settings (or other location) is the settings to ADD the AdSense widget to the AG theme?
Thanks,
Neil
I tried replacing the_content with the_excerpt in index.php and it works as it should ONLY on the home page. Looking the code, I noticed that the theme code tries to distinguish between the home page and a single post, but the logic does not consider that if you have the excerpt on the home page you should have the content on the post page.
I can most likely fix this myself, but I am not a programmer (or have not been one for 20 years) and would rather see the theme's logic fixed properly.