Agregado is yet another amazing WordPress theme release by Smashing Magazine, this time in collaboration with designer Darren Hoyt. This theme is known as a “lifestream” theme, designed to preserve the personal website. I’ll be giving this theme a complete review, along with information on how to use it, and an overview of features.

And now onto the review…

My Expectations

I’m not expecting this theme to work perfectly right out of the box. Some extra configurations will probably be necessary to get everything running smoothly. I’m also expecting some sort of integration features with third-party services such as Flickr and Twitter. This would be part of the lifestreaming capabilities of the Agregado theme.

Setting Up

The first thing you have to do is upload and activate the theme. After that, you’ll need to make sure you have pretty permalinks enabled. This is for the archive page link. You’ll need to input information such as your Twitter account and Delicious username to get the lifestream set up. Finally, you will have to input your e-mail address for the contact form.

Archives Page

To set up an archives page, you’ll have to create a new page with “archives” as the page slug, preferably titled “Archives.” After this, you’ll need to scroll down on your page write menu until you find Page Templates. Select the “archives” template from the dropdown box.

Theme Options

This is where you input all of your account usernames and feeds for use in the lifestream carousel for the following third-party services.

• Twitter
• Delcious
• Flickr
• Magnolia
• Pownce
• Good Reads
• Last.fm
• Facebook

You can also configure your contact form, add additional feeds, and set the date format.

Final Thoughts

This theme actually worked a lot better than I expected out of the box. Unlike the last Smashing Magazine theme I reviewed, there were no errors, and everything seem solidly coded and documented. I’m also pleased that this theme doesn’t depend on any outside plugins, everything you need is built-in to the theme itself. I’ll probably be using a modified version of this theme on one of my other blogs soon.