Simple CMS WordPress Theme

Posted on Mar 14th 2008 by Ryan.

My Simple CMS WordPress plugin is designed to simplify the WordPress administration panel for clients of web designers who are providing WordPress as a CMS for a basic static site.

The Simple CMS WordPress Theme on the other hand is designed to simplify the design process for the web designer by only implementing the features needed for a basic static site.

This theme is not designed to look pretty, but is a practical, simple theme to build your own designs from.

Demo

Simple CMS WordPress Theme demo

Download

Simple CMS WordPress Theme Download

Features

The theme does not display comments, tags, categories or anything related to posts only. This theme is intended to display WordPress Pages and nothing else.

The entire theme folder contains only four PHP files, unlike WordPress’s default Kubrick theme which uses 16! Hopefully this will make building themes for static websites a lot easier as there is less junk to remove to create your simple static site.

Note: Just like the Simple CMS WordPress plugin, this theme is only designed to work with WordPress Version 2.5 (yet to be released). However it ‘probably’ does work with Version 2.0+ (I haven’t checked).

Posted in Web Development.

17 Responses to “Simple CMS WordPress Theme”

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  1. Ryan on: April 5th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    Brian - Thanks for the bug report. Quite a few people have noticed that but never told me what actually happened and how the bug affected them. So I’ve ignored it and put it on my list of minor corrections to do some day. I’ve now gone and quadruple checked the demo page in IE7 and sure enough, the bug is preventing the page from loading some times. So I’d better get that fixed quickly. Thanks for the help :)

  2. Brian on: April 5th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    Ryan,
    Thanks for the clarification. Re the ‘bad’ link it could possibly be the result of the following error message that I get in both IE7 and Firefox:-
    “zfalse is undefined”
    In my IE7 it works sometimes and not others.
    In FF everytime is OK, but with the error message.
    Cheers
    Brian

  3. Ryan on: April 5th, 2008 at 11:20 am

    Brian - No, the two plugins are unrelated. I included a dropdown menu in the Simple CMS theme as the only other route to displaying sub pages would be to add a sidebar or to setup a horizontal sub menu.

    The Simple CMS Plugin is designed to work well with the Simple CMS Theme, but the Dropdown plugins are intended to be used on all sorts of blogs/websites hence all the options for adding blogrolls, archives, categories etc.

    The dropdown plugin beta demo link seems to be working fine now. I don’t know why it wouldn’t have been working before.

    The Simple CMS theme is intended for developers looking to recode a WordPress theme from scratch. So I’m assuming most people using it will know enough to be able to add the necessary codes to the core theme files to get the extra options in the dropdowns plugin working. You can still install the plugin though, it will work just as well as it would with any other theme, it’s just that there will be a bunch of useless options in the admin panel that’s all.

  4. Brian on: April 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am

    Ryan,
    Oh. This clarifies and confuses somewhat. I have installed the suckerfish dropdown menu 1.6.4 thinking that it was intended as an enhancement for the Simple CMS Theme. I was waiting for your other suckerfish plugin to come out of beta before trying it, as I had assumed that it was a further enhanced menu option. Incidently the Demo link for it seems to be broken. I can follow your comments in your previous reply and think that I can implement them if necessary, but will await your clarification on the respective roles of the 2 plugins for use in a CMS only site.
    Thanks
    Brian

  5. Ryan on: April 5th, 2008 at 12:08 am

    Categories facility? No, that’s not meant to be present in the Simple CMS theme.

    Or are you using the Dropdowns Plugin as well? In which case that plugin isn’t designed with this theme in mind. If you want to control the dropdowns, you can do that directly with the themes code. For example, you can grab the Javascript codes from the plugin and insert them directly into your theme to get the smooth animated effects found in the beta plugin. To control the CSS, you can just add the code from the Dropdowns CSS generator page directly into your themes CSS file.

  6. Brian on: April 4th, 2008 at 11:54 pm

    Ryan,
    Hopefully you will get a chance to come up our way before we lose you again.
    I have a query. I note that you left the categories facility implemented and I wonder what you see as it’s likely use on a ‘normal static-type’ of website, say one where the CMS facility is primarily to allow the client to perform event/calendar updates and/or posting of images, e.g, products with descriptions, or animals with pedigree….
    I assume that you must have seen it as being very useful, hence my query.
    Brian.

  7. Ryan on: April 4th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

    Thanks for the accommodation offer :)

    I don’t think I’ll be up that way any time soon but I’ll keep it in mind!

    I thought I’d left some sort of security hole open when I saw your first comment so hurredly checked my .htaccess and CHMOD settings, but they’re fine … whew!

    That’s not my host that left http://ryanhellyer.net/test/ open for viewing, that was me. I often forget the URL’s so find it handy to have access to them all from that folder. They’re just my test sites mainly, so nothing particularly exciting to be seen in there.

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