The Arthemia WordPress theme, designed by Michael Jubel, is probably one of the cleanest and feature-packed free themes I’ve seen in a long time. I thought I share my experience with this theme in a review post.
And now onto the review…
First Impressions
Just looking at the live demo of Arthemia, I knew that this theme was designed for blogs with lots of content. Like I expressed above, I thought the layout was great which in a way reminded me of the Miniml theme. There is also ample room for advertisement space in 468×60 and 300×250 sizes.
I figured the theme would make use of custom fields for the thumbnail images, although probably not so dependent on them as the last theme I reviewed, Infinity.
Another thing which I expected is some manual configuration required. Since the theme separates content by category, there must be some way to choose which categories get displayed under Browse Categories, as well as possibly setting a “Featured” category at the top.
Setting Up
After uploading and activating the theme on a fresh WordPress installation, I got a site that looked like this:
As you can see, there is still content to be added and other required configurations to the theme to be made.
Top Posts Area
To get posts to display at the very top of the homepage, you’ll need to create 2 categories: Headline and Featured. As a test, I added those 2 categories to the “Hello World!” post. Here is the result:
You’ll notice the big glaring spaces where the thumbnails are supposed to be. That brings us to the next step…
Custom Thumbnails
This theme has built in image resizing, so you should be able to upload a large image, with smaller thumbnails automatically generated, all through your WordPress upload screen. Once you’ve uploaded, you use a custom field key called “Image” along with the image location on your base WordPress URL. You would set up the custom fields like illustrated in this image:
Category Bar
This will require some code editing. To get the category bar working you’ll need to gather a list of your category ID numbers and place them in the following array, comma separated.
$display_categories = array(5,6,7,8,11);
To complete it, make sure you have nice category descriptions set for each category you plan on displaying in the category bar.
Conclusion
Overall this is a very well-made theme. There’s not much I would change. The built-in image resizing script is a convenient touch. It would be nice if there was a theme options page so those people uncomfortable with editing code wouldn’t have to do so. Hopefully though with these detailed instructions, even a beginner would be able to use this theme without any problems.
I’ve just tweaked this theme
It is a nice theme indeed.
But talking about advance and complicated theme, The Option theme by Justin Tadlock still my choice…
Maybe I can port this theme become the child theme of Option?
Ha, The design is inviting indeed…(Arthemia)…
I like long ago introduced
This looks like a nice magazine style theme. It also looks like it would work well for someone using WP as a content management system as opposed to a conventional blog.
Nice theme, although I agree that allowing the categories to be chosen via an options page would really make this theme sore to the next level.
Also, your theme reviews are great. Keep up the good work!
I have to say, it’s probably one of my favorite free themes out there.
im looking to get this theme set up any one want to make some money i suck at coding lol email me
wow awesome theme dude
Thanks for your god work
@ mike,
You can contact me through my site, and I can give you a quote.
Phew…just got back from a vacation. I just moderated a ton of pending comments. Anyway…
@Pangeran: I’m not sure if Arthemia could be ported as a child theme of Options. This question may be better answered by Justin Tadlock.
@mike: Adam (IndieLab aka WordPress Modder) should be able to help.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
nice theme. I am using it now in my blog. I’ll be editing the images though. Would that be okay? or Is there any restrictions or obligations I have to do?
@Jecy: I don’t see why that would be a problem, but you should probably try contacting the designer to be sure.
Definitively a professional theme. Thanks for that.
This is a magnificent theme, well layed out,clean, sufficiently complex, yet not overpowering, would be a perfect for one of upcoming proect. Well done Michael Jubel! Wonderful presentation and review Leland. Thank You
Hi
I’ve just started using this theme on my site and come across a problem with Meta Robots Tag which stops search engines indexing your web site.
I ran a SEO report once I had my site ready and it threw up a WARNING message which I thought you might like to know about and advise your readers. The Arthemia 2 template adds a couple of META Robots Tag statements which are quite harmful if your site has gone live, because they tell search engines like Google NOT to index your site!!!! Which means, no one will find your website unless these tags are removed.
I have written details of this and how to remove it here:
http://technicalarticles.co.uk/?p=105
Has anyone else come across this problem?
Any help appreciated.
Dan
@Dan: I think you would have found this with any theme using the wp_head tag, which they should. The problem is not the theme, but with your WordPress settings. I suggest you read this post on the subject: http://www.themelab.com/2008/06/22/are-you-killing-your-own-wordpress-seo/
Leland
I really appreciate your response to my message on your site, and really you’re a GENIUS!!
Its been such a long time ago since I checked my privacy settings in the Dashboard, and so when I read your response, I went to check it straight away and it was set to ‘Block Search Engines but allow normal visitors’.
I’m not sure whether thats a default setting for my Wordpress install or whether I set it this way while my site was n’t ready, bit I’d totally forgotten about it. This explains the origins of the NOINDEX & NOFOLLOW insertions, because I could see the template being used everywhere and no-one else seemed to be having the problem.
So thanks very much for your help, its appreciated.
I will look at updating my own article to add a conclusion to this problem for my readers.
Dan
Where exactly do I edit the category coding? Sorry for asking the similiar question that has already been answered but its just not at the level I would I understand.
Randy,
Look inside the index.php file.
Leland
I’m stuck with a little problem with the arthemia theme on my site here:
http://technicalarticles.co.uk/
I can’t seem to add more articles on the bottom section of the front page under the Browse Category.. is there an easy way to do this, seem to be missing something.