JaypeeOnline

If you have a WordPress-powered blog, one of the sites that you need to subscribe to is Smashing Magazine. Why? Because they regularly release some of the best premium-quality free WordPress themes that you can find. Last week, Smashing Magazine released another free WordPress theme called “Imprezz”, designed by Gopal Raju of ProductiveDreams.

In this post we release Imprezz – a simple and beautiful 3-column-theme, a free WordPress theme designed by Gopal Raju from ProductiveDreams for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The theme can be used in various setting for various purposes – in magazine-blogs, but also in corporate and private blogs. The theme supports WordPress 2.7.1 and works well with the zdcomments widget (which is used to display the top commenters). The package also include the PSD-source file of the logo.

This is the second time Gopal has collaborated and created a WordPress theme for Smashing Magazine, the first was the Blak Magik WordPress theme.

Basic Features:

• 3 columns
• Widget-ready
• Customizable logo
• WordPress 2.7.1 support

*This theme requires the zdcomments widget to display the top commentators.

Screenshot:

My Take:
The Imprezz WordPress theme has a very good color scheme and a simple yet good overall design/layout. I like the ribbon elements used in the middle column that displays the segment titles like Archives, Categories, etc. I also like the Twitter section that displays the author’s latest tweet and a link that lets visitors/readers follow the blog author on Twitter. This theme doesn’t have much extra features and is a very basic WordPress theme. The author did include the logo’s PSD file so the user can easily customize and make the logo personal using Adobe Photoshop.

Although it is a very nice theme, it does have some imperfections especially in the code. First of all, the theme doesn’t include documentation or installation instructions. Second, the theme contains some hard coded elements that belong to the theme author like the logo URL, RSS feed and Twitter account that should be edited by the user.

*You’ll need to use Notepad or any other text editor to edit the php files.

Logo URL
To edit the logo URL, open sidebar.php and go to line 2 and replace YourBlogURL with your blog’s URL.

<a href="http://www.YourBlogURL.com"></a>

RSS
To edit the RSS feed button link, open the header.php file and go to line 24 and replace the URL with your own RSS feed URL.

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourRSSfeed" class="topnav_rss">RSS</a>

Twitter
You’ll have to edit the following files: archive.php, index.php, page.php, search.php and single.php. Look for a div class named “twitter-content” and replace the values TwitterUser with your own Twitter account name. (theme contains theme author’s Twitter account)

<div class="twitter-content">
        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/javascripts/blogger.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/TwitterUser.json?callback=twitterCallback2&amp;count=1"></script>
<a class="followme" href="http://twitter.com/TwitterUser">Follow us on twitter</a>
</div>

Remove author logo
To remove the theme author’s logo, you’ll have to edit the following files: archive.php, index.php, page.php, search.php and single.php. Delete the following piece of code:

<img src="../images/pdlogo.gif" alt="productivedreams" class="pdlogo"/>

Aside from these “issues”, there are also some things that can be a problem for some users. The top navigation menu for the blog pages is too small/narrow and if you have lots of pages or your pages have long names, the titles will overlap the logo. Only the left column (one containing logo) is widgetized, the right column/sidebar is not widgetized. The left column doesn’t display some widget correctly and some widgets text have the same color as the column background so the text becomes invisible. The theme also has some alignment issues when viewed with Internet Explorer 7. Last but not least, the Imprezz theme doesn’t have links to let users navigate to the next page or older posts which should be a standard feature in any WordPress theme.

Inspite of all these “issues”, the Imprezz WordPress theme is still a very good theme to use although it does require a lot of editing and fixing before you can use it. Hopefully, the theme author would address these issues and fix them and then release an updated version of the theme.

Preview or Download the Imprezz WordPress theme