Smashing Magazine has quite the reputation for releasing very high quality free WordPress themes. They have recently released an absolutely gorgeous free theme called Infinity. I finally had the chance to give this theme a test drive and thought I would share my findings in a review post.

And now onto the review…

First Impressions

Obviously the first thing that stood out with this theme is the beautiful artwork. Another thing is the unconventional index page. Instead of the same old boring blog layout, Infinity uses a more gallery-oriented approach. These two elements give the theme a much more unique look.

Setting Up

Upon uploading and installing the theme on a fresh WordPress installation, you’ll notice a fatal error due to a missing FlickrRSS plugin. Although this plugin is included in the download package, I personally find this to be bad coding practice to not use a conditional tag to prevent this error.

To quickly fix this error, you can either remove the following code from the ancillary.php file:

<div class="flickr"><?php get_flickrRSS(); ?></div>

Or you could replace it with the following, if you plan to set up your FlickrRSS later:

<?php if (function_exists('get_flickrRSS')) { ?><div class="flickr"><?php get_flickrRSS(); ?></div><?php } ?>

After doing this, your Infinity set up should look something like this.

Setting Up Thumbnails

Infinity makes use of WordPress custom fields to set up the thumbnails for posts on the main index. To use them, use the “thumbnail” custom field key, and the full path to the image as the value.

Editing The Sidebars

Unless your name is yichi, and you just happen to be a GUI designer, you’ll probably want to customize the sidebars. They are broken up into 2 files, left.php and right.php. These 2 files represent the left side of the sidebar, and the right side, respectively. The left.php has all the stuff you’ll want to change, such as the Twitter and del.cio.us accounts, as well as the description of yourself.

Things I Would Add

Aside from making the FlickrRSS code error proof, I would also add tag listings on the single post pages. More information on how to do this is in my adding tag support to your theme tutorial. I’d also make use of Gravatars on the comment section, which I’ve gone over in my adding Gravatar support to WordPress comments. One major feature that’s missing in this theme are widget-ready sidebars. So yes, I would definitely make this WordPress theme widget-ready.

Another small mistake which I noticed is that the feed link in the top right corner linked to http://yourFeedUrl. I would replace this with the following template tag:

<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>

Although those using FeedBurner may not need this.

Conclusion

Hope you found this WordPress theme review useful. Head on over to Smashing Magazine to download the Infinity theme to try it out for yourself.