WordPress Theme - Digital Statement

Following the footsteps of the much successful theme Statement, comes another free WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog called - “Digital Statement”. This can also be called as Version 2.0 of the Statement theme because it takes all the code and converts it into a modern, more visually appealing, and with better functionality.

This version of the theme has been created by the owner of Neowster.com who gladly gave it to me for a free public release. With neat stuff like featured posts’ slide show, a nice navigation (for both pages/sub-pages and categories), content tabs, Twitter posts, site navigation, this theme is a winner

How to set up Digital Statement?

This theme makes use of plugins and custom scripts that have to be installed before you start using this theme. Here are the steps that will help you set up the theme properly :-

When you download and extract the theme’s zip file, you will see a plugins folder along with the theme. Install and activate all plugins in the package to your wp-content/plugins directory.
To setup twitter, go to http://twitter.com/badges/html, copy the javascript to the footer.php file in the theme folder, replacing lines 58 – 59
This theme has a featured component (top right) which can pull posts and display them as a neat slide show along with corresponding images (done through custom fields). The posts are pulled from a particular category which can be specified in the gallery.php file of the theme. Open gallery.php file and change the category ID (cat=) in line 14 :-
<?php query_posts('showposts=5&cat=2');?>

For the slide show images, you will have to make a custom field with each post in the category with the key => “gallery_image” and value will be the upload path of the image.

Get more information here. Also, remember that you will at least need two minimum posts (with custom field set) before the slide show will work properly.
This theme also features a login box sliding panel on the top. For the login box to appear in the panel, you need to go to Admin > Settings > Membership > and check the “Anyone can register”.
For the thumbnail images next to the posts on the index.php file, you will have to create a custom field called “Image” with every post.
In order to display the “About” section on the right sidebar, your admin email will need to be associated with gravatar, and you will need to fill up the “Biographical Info” in the Admin > Users section.
Finally, setup flickrRSS (a plugin is used to accomplish this) to link to your Flickr account. Set it to display 10 square images from Flickr.com. For the 11th image, it is a custom setup which you can edit in footer.php on line 16.

This theme has been tested on WordPress 2.6, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox without any problems. (As a tribute to Obama being the new American President, I have used his photos for the theme testing. If you don’t like him, please don’t feel offended He is the new president after all…)