We’ve seen quite a bunch of WordPress plugins released this year for Lifestreaming which has been great. Now we are finally starting to see theme developers incorporate Lifestreaming into their designs. Earlier in the year Chris Pirillo released the WicketPixie theme which included a Lifestreaming plugin and incorporated it into the design. I plan to write about it very soon but today I want to tell you about Agregado.
The Agregado theme was designed from the ground up specifically with Lifestreaming in mind. It was commissioned by Smashing Magazine. Last week I was contacted by Darren Hoyt (one of the designers Matt Dawson is the other) to let me know about it. He also told me that he’d been reading my blog all summer which helped him gather ideas to create it. I was excited and glad to hear that my blog is providing information to help others develop tools and spread Lifestreaming even further.
Click image to visit demo site
I installed this on my dev server to test it out and I really like the design. I like the highlighting of the latest post with a two column display of titles from older posts. Then the right sidebar contains the Lifestream with an ajax selector to scroll up and down the items listed. There is also a very nice custom archive page included as well as a built in contact form.
Here’s the feature list:
- Lifestream module with carousel
- Animated dropdown menus
- Custom archives page
- Built-in contact form module with AJAX sent/fail message
- Built-in drop caps for paragraphs
- Numerical pagination on archive and search pages
- Author-highlighting for comments
- User profile module
- Widgetized bottom bar on homepage
- Widgetized sidebar on single post pages
- ‘More in this Category’ sidebar module
- Control panel options for lifestream and contact form
The Lifestream admin screen has support for Flickr, Delicious, Magnolia, Twitter, Pownce, GoodReads, Last.fm, and Facebook as well as 4 custom feeds with support for custom icons for each of them. This is a good start and hopefully they will add support for more in the future.
Admin Screen
Overall this is a nice theme with some nice Lifestreaming support. Some of the things I didn’t like was how categories are listed on the top header of the page. I like having the more common “Pages” occupying that space. Also I would like to see a dedicated Lifestream page to compliment the sidebar version. Here’s were it could shine if they offer some nice flexible options. Using the same method they used to build the Archives page would be real nice too. It has that SweetCron Boxy feel to it and would add much more Lifestreaming value to the theme. Darren should be motivated to do this as he is currently using a modified version of the SimpleLife plugin to provide a dedicated Lifestream page on his blog 🙂
Custom Archives page. Click for live demo
This is definitely worth checking out and I look forward to future versions. Make sure to check out the requirements before installing as well.
Check out the Agregado theme info here:
A very nice layout for this theme.
A very nice layout for this theme.
I took your theme (because i love the interface of it, absolutely AMAZING) and just skinned it and added in a little of my own touches.. check it out and tell me what you think 🙂 Also I will be adding credit in a “special thanks” section of the site rather than the footer, if that’s okay with you (i like to be a little more personal in giving credit than just a backlink).