WP Theme Review: Tasty Showcase

I promised my friend Leland of ThemeLab a WordPress theme review a long time ago but due to some circumstances, I wasn’t able to do it. I’ve never forgotten that promise and I always remind myself that I owe him a review. When I found out that he was gonna release a new free WordPress theme last week, I thought that this was my chance to do the review that I owed him.

Today, I’m gonna share with you ThemeLab’s latest free WordPress theme called – Tasty Showcase. This theme is the winner of ThemeLab’s theme battle #3 and was originally designed as a CSS template by Brad of DemusDesign and then ported to WordPress by Leland. Tasty Showcase is a 2 column, widget-ready theme that features several widgetized areas and a jQuery-powered slider that features the most recent posts.

Features:

  • 2 columns
  • Widget-ready
  • Widgetized sidebar
  • WIdgetized footer
  • Widgetized home footer
  • 404 template
  • Recent posts slider/slideshow
  • Built-in gravatar support
  • Threaded comments support
  • XHTML & CSS compliant
  • Works with IE 7, Firefox 3+ and Google Chrome

Screenshots:
Homepage
Tasty Showcase WordPress Theme

Post page
Tasty Showcase WordPress Theme

My Take:
The Tasty Showcase WordPress theme is a simple yet elegant looking theme. It is minimalistic but at the same time, has a very lively and colorful appearance. It has several of the basic theme features that users look for in a theme – widget-ready, built-in gravatar and threaded comments support.

The jQuery-powered slider features 4 of the most recent posts and randomly highlights one of these posts between intervals. The featured posts display the post title, number of comments, date published and an excerpt of the post. The slider also displays a 653×367 custom image which is set by the user. In case there is no specified or provided image, the theme will automatically use one of the default placeholder images to make sure that there won’t be blank spaces in the slider.

The Tasty Showcase theme is a widget lover’s dream. As mentioned by the theme author, this theme has precisely 14 widgetized areas.

  • Sidebar – Four areas, one full width above, two half widths, and one full width below
  • Footer – Five areas, one for each column
  • Home Footer – Four areas, one for each column
  • 404 Template – One area, so you can customize your 404 pages

Widgetized Areas
Tasty Showcase WordPress Theme
Diagram shows all the “Sidebar” and “Footer” widget areas. Not pictured are the “Home Footer” areas (basically the same place as the regular footer, except on the homepage) and the 404 template widget areas.

Issues I have with the theme? Only a few minor issues that depends on user preference. First, the color scheme. I don’t have any problems with the current default color scheme but I don’t think everyone will like it. Having more color schemes to choose from would definitely be a plus for this theme. Second, the 653×367 custom image. Not all users use images or have post images in that size so it can be a turn-off for some users, especially those who use a lot of post images but don’t want to go through the hassle of editing photos just for the featured posts slider.

I found one tiny flaw while testing the theme with Firefox on Ubuntu. The message/comment text box is overlapping the comment box area. This only happens on Ubuntu and works fine with Firefox on Windows, so I’m guessing it has something to do with the settings I have on Ubuntu. Another tiny flaw I discovered is an issue with the blog name/header. When I tested the theme on a netbook (1024×600 resolution), a small part of the blog name/header (left side) was covered or hidden. This can be fixed with a few tweaks on the stylesheet (style.css file).

Overall, the Tasty Showcase is a cool and unique free WordPress theme. Although it uses a couple javascripts, it doesn’t use much graphics so the theme loads quite fast compared to other themes. Kudos to Leland (ThemeLab) for porting this nice CSS template to WordPress and making it available for free to the WordPress community. Same goes for the original designer Brad of DemusDesign.

Preview or Download the Tasty Showcase WordPress theme.

NOTE: This theme was scanned using the Theme Authenticity Checker and doesn’t contain any hidden or encrypted code.

This post may contain affiliate links that allow us to earn commissions at no additional cost to you. We are reader-supported so when you buy through the affiliate links, you are also helping or supporting us. 

9 Comments

  1. Hello,
    I really like your theme and I am glad I found it. I want to use it for one or more of my sites. The one thing I just have not been able to get right is the posts titles published in the slider’s right hand side column. I have looked into the Stylesheeet as well as the code trying to find the reason but, with no luck.
    Would you please point me to the areas in the theme where I could possibly find the solution to this?

    Thank you for your help and time.

  2. The theme has a nice color scheme but the overall look reminds me of those templates for ‘business’ sites a couple of years ago, you remember? The ones that were released just for the heck of it and for the link bait.

    Though is one of the few themes I’ve found to have lots of widgetized areas.

  3. @Leland – You’re welcome my friend! There aren’t a lot of people using Ubuntu but I’m sure there are a lot of people who use smaller resolutions especially with netbooks.

Leave a Reply to Leland Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

JaypeeOnline