It is available for free and is one of the best magazine style templates out there. With this theme the homepage is no longer a long list of post after post. But the magazine template gives your site a unique look and feel which sets the site apart from its competition. However as with any magazine theme, Arthemia can be a bit difficult to setup mostly due to the number of features and options built in to it. Here is a quick and dirty list of things to do when installing Arthemia for your own blog.

Installing Arthemia

Installing this theme is no different than any other theme in the WordPress directory. Visit the theme page and download it to your computer. Unzip the file. Then upload the files to /wp-content/themes directory on your webserver. Once the upload is complete go to Appearance – Themes and Activate the Arthemia theme.

Arthemia Logo

The Arthemia logo is located in your WordPress installation directory under themes/arthemia/images/logo.png Ideally the the logo should be about 400px wide and 100px high. This will give you enough room for the 468×60 ad block to the right of the logo. I have had no problems with a logo that is 468×99px. For easiest installation name your logo image as logo.png and upload it in the same directory. When asked to confirm just overwrite the default image. If you are using a different logo size then go to WordPress dashboard – Appearance – Editor and edit Header (header.php) Look for the following line and delete width=”177px” height=”39px”.

/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/logo.png” width=”177px” height=”39px” alt=”"

Categories

The first thing you need to do after activating the theme is go to Posts – Categories and create 2 new categories called Headline and Featured. These will be used for the placing posts on the Headline and Featured sections on top of the home page. Headline is the top left large rectangular block. The featured section has a set of 3 or 4 posts and their thumbnails on the top right side of the home page.

Custom Image Field

One of the features of Arthemia is the auto-thumbnail and resizer function that puts an associated image next to the post. This image is then associated to the post on the blog home page, category pages, tag pages and archives. This is done by creating a custom field called Image and the value should be wp-content/uploads/2008/04/pool.jpg or wp-content/uploads/image.jpg unless of course you have the image upload specified to a different directory.

Categories Bar On Homepage

To specify the categories in the bar on the homepage right below the Headline section you have to do a small code modification. Go to Appearance – Editor in WordPress dashboard and click the Main Index Template (index.php). Then find the below line and change the numbers with the category id’s that you want to display. You can easily find the category id’s by going to the blog dashboard – Posts – Categories and clicking the category name. Then look at your address bar and it will have the ID listed as &cat_ID=7.

php $display_categories = array(3,4,5,8,9); $i = 1;

List Of Posts On Homepage

In most cases you would like to list the latest posts on the home page. If for some reason you would like to block posts in certain categories from displaying then you can specify them in the code. On Main Index Template (index.php) locate the following line and specify the category id’s you would like to block. In the below example the posts in category 27 & 28 are blocked from displaying. In the same line you also have the ability to limit the number of posts displayed per page.

query_posts(“cat=-27,-28&paged=$page&posts_per_page=5″);

Sidebar Ad Block 300×250

Go to Sidebar (sidebar.php) and locate this line and replace it with your ad code.

< img src="< ? php echo get_option('home'); ?>/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/banners/square.jpg” alt=”" width=”300px” height=”250px” />

Header Ad Block 468×60

Go to Header (header.php) and locate this line and replace it with your ad code.

< img src="< ? php echo get_option('home'); ?>/wp-content/themes/arthemia/images/banners/wide.jpg” alt=”" width=”468px” height=”60px” />

Header Links

Go to Header (header.php) and locate this line and add links to sites in between li tags. You can add them before or after the wp_list_pages function. That line basically adds a menu item for every page created on your site. Sub-pages are created and added to the menu items as drop-down links when you hover over the parent page.

< li > < a href = " < ? php echo get_option('home'); ? >/”>Home< /li >
< ? php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ? >

"Display" Theme for WordPress

It is best suited for Business and Portfolio sites. It comes with a 3D Image slideshow that can be controlled from the backend in your WordPress Dashboard with a custom tool. The Theme has a huge WordPress custom backend (with 8 additional Admin Pages) that make customization of the Theme easy for those who do not know much about coding or WordPress.

It comes with 3 extra skins to choose from:

• Light,
  
• Dark,
  
• Minimal
  

File Types that are included:

Compatible with:

• Firefox 2 & 3
  
• IE 6, IE 7, IE 8,
  
• Opera,
  
• Safari
  

Mystique Theme for WordPress

Get it now. it is free and so easy to use.

This website is based on it. If you want to learn how to tweak it just add a comment at the end of the post.