ThrillingTheme is a free, GPL-licensed, SEO- and social media-optimized WordPress template! This is my personal design (that you see here at Thrilling Heroics) that I’ve customized, tweaked, and perfected for a year and a half, and I’m excited to finally release this as a free public download!

Basic Features

• 4 Color Schemes – Shades of Grey, Thrilling Orange, Black & White, Icy Blue
• Search Engine Optimized
• Customize your header with your own logo & snapshot image!
• Auto-sized featured images & thumbnails
• Easy integration with Twitter, Flickr & Facebook
• Tabbed features/popular posts & more in the sidebar
• Integration with FeedBurner email subscriptions
• 125×125 and 300×250 ad management
• Blog category dropdowns
• 3 widget-ready sidebar areas
• Built-in support for WordPress Related Posts
• WP 2.7+ nested comments!
• Gravatar support in comments
• Compressed CSS & minified JavaScript for faster load time
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap & photo galleries
• Easy customization with the integrated theme options page
• Totally FREE for commercial & individual use

Are you ready to Thrillify your blog?

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Easily-Customizable Header

ThrillingTheme comes with an attractive, two-tone title font by default, or you can upload your own custom logo image. Additionally, if you want your own polaroid photo, upload any image to your Media Library, copy/paste the URL and ThrillingTheme automatically resizes, crops & frames your photo snapshot!

Social Media Integration

We’re all about the social media profiles around here! And we make it easy to integrate your latest Twitter updates, recent Flickr photos, and even insert a link to your Facebook group or fan page. The ThrillingTheme sidebar comes with pre-designed widgets for your RSS & email subscriptions, advertisements, Twitter, Flickr & more. One note: while there is widget support, these custom widgets are all hard-coded into the sidebar (in the most effective order I’ve found after 3 years of experimentation) so you’ll need to open up sidebar.php if you want to re-organize things.

Encouraging Readers to Engage

We’ve also optimized your post meta to keep visitors on your website longer and encourage them to share on social bookmarking sites. Single post pages come with quick submission buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon & more.  Post dates are moved to the bottom to encourage ever-green content. We’ve also built in support for the WordPress Related Posts plugin to encourage readers to dig deeper into your site.

Integrated Back-End Theme Options

The powerful admin options page allows you to make changes without editing code: add your logo, insert your own snapshot, change color schemes, easily integrate your Twitter, Flickr & Facebook profiles, add your Google Analytics tracking code, and manage your ad slots. Everything is plug-and-play!

Add Featured Photos to your Blog Posts

To display large, beautiful, preformatted feature photos on the main page, simply upload your photo to the media library, copy the full image URL and paste it in the custom “Featured Image URL” field on your Edit Post page. A script built into the theme will automatically re-size your images to 540×195 pixels for the front page and create thumbnail images for archive pages.

Custom Page Templates

The theme comes with three preformatted custom page templates: an image gallery template, and sitemap and archives page templates for beautifully laid-out, quick links to all of your static pages, chronological & categorical archives.

Cross-Browser Compatible

I’ve tested ThrillingTheme thoroughly to make it play nice with all major web browsers including Firefox 2+, Safari 2+, Internet Explorer 7+, Opera 9+, and Google Chrome. It has limited but functional compatibility with IE6, and even asks visitors to upgrade, if you want to encourage better web browsing like I do (you can turn this nag off if you like).

WordPress Compatibility

ThrillingTheme has been tested on WordPress version 2.5 and up. I’m willing to bet it is compatible with older versions, but for best results (and the most secure blog installation) it’s best to upgrade to at least WordPress 2.8.

General Public License

ThrillingTheme is based largely on the GPL-licensed WooThemes framework and other open-source code, and is therefore itself made available publicly as free software licensed under the GNU GPL 3.0 license. Free to download, and free to share. You’ll totally earn good karma if you leave the footer links intact and link to this article to help spread the word, but you’re entirely free to use it anyway you like for your commercial or personal blog, modify, alter, improve upon and redistribute ThrillingTheme to your heart’s content.

Download ThrillingTheme 1.1 now!

Filesize: 749.98 KB | 11016 downloads

Thanks so much for your continued support and encouragement!

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Installation

1. Download ‘ThrillingTheme.zip’ with the link above and unzip the file.
2. Upload the entire ‘ThrillingTheme’ directory via FTP to your server and place it in the ‘/wp-content/themes/’ folder.
3. Log into your WordPress admin panel and click on the Appearance > Themes tab. Now click on the Thrilling Theme  to activate it.
4. Note: When first activating the theme, the preview pane may show that the theme contains “errors”, but this is only because you haven’t configured the theme options yet.
5. Complete all of the required inputs on the Thrilling Theme Options page (in the WP admin panel) and click “Save Changes”.

Recommended Plugins

I highly recommend the following plugins with your ThrillingTheme for best results:

• WordPress Related Posts
• All In One SEO Pack
• WP Database Backup
• Redirection
• What Would Seth Godin Do

Help & Support

If you have bug reports, please leave your comments here. I can’t provide free support for this theme, but I will do my best to keep it updated and fix any major errors that you guys report here. If you urgently need help customizing ThrillingTheme for your site, I am for hire.

1. How to add featured images to your blog posts on the Add New Post page (click me) (reader video)
2. How to get your Twitter image URL to add to the sidebar widget (click me)
3. How to use page templates to add an Image Gallery, Sitemap or Archives page to your blog (on the Add New Page panel)
4. If you already use an existing custom field to generate image thumbnails on your site, read this for instructions to incorporate your existing thumbnails/featured images
5. IF YOU HAVE ANY MAJOR PROBLEMS, MAKE SURE YOU ARE USING THE MOST RECENT VERSION OF THE THEME.
   
6. If you have trouble with Twitter updates not showing up, read this.
7. If you have trouble with featured images not showing up, first try using JPG images. On many servers, PNG files will not work, for example.
   
8. Next, try clearing the image cache located in the ‘/wp-content/themes/ThrillingTheme/cache/’ directory.
9. If that doesn’t help, right-click on the post page and view Page Source. Check the source of the image file, on some servers you may need to change the file path in thumb.php. (More in this comment here, or ask your host)
10. If you still have problems with the image resizer, try these 3 fixes and make sure your host is running PHP 5.
11. Ask your host if Apache is running under the same user as your WordPress blog to ensure WordPress can write to the filesystem and perform all of its automatic functions correctly.

Help support the continued development & improvement of this theme:

Theme Changelog

Oct 28, 2009 version 1.0.0

• Theme released

Oct 29, 2009 version 1.0.1

• Updated header.php, functions.php & sidebar.php to fix updated FeedBurner email subscription handling.

Oct 30, 2009 version 1.0.2

• Removed get_avatar() option from Theme Options page to eliminate conflict with WordPress core.

Nov 4, 2009 version 1.0.3

• Removed legacy code for asides_category & video_category, which caused issues in archives listings.
• Incorporated Raam Dev‘s rewrite of sidebar.php Twitter call using cURL. If you still have trouble with Twitter updates, try reversing this fix found here: http://pastie.org/677368

Nov 8, 2009 version 1.0.4

• Fixed shortcode PHP line endings in header.php that cause parsing errors in some installations.

Nov 10, 2007 version 1.0.5

• Fixed header so categories used in the nav bar don’t wrap in to the main content area.
• Updated styling on the welcome message in the header so it properly centers vertically no matter how much text you enter!

Nov 14, 2007 version 1.0.6

• Added complete GNU General Public License information to properly attribute copyright of original FreshNews Theme files to WooThemes/Magnus Jepson. Thanks for an incredible GPL licensed theme framework guys.
• Reformatted promo box & tags in the post meta of single post pages.
• Changed default 300×250 ad slot to point to WooThemes.com
• Properly escaped all database queries in header, sidebar & single page with stripslashes() call.

Nov 30, 2007 version 1.1

• Categories in the navbar are now ordered by count (# of posts in each cat) & limited to help prevent them from dropping down into the site layout (you can edit this in header.php and change the # where it says &limit=7
• Min-width set to background for rare cases where background image doesn’t extend the whole width of the window.
• Footer attribution to FreelanceWP.com
• Support for WP 2.7+ nested comments

Credits & Thanks

Huge thanks are due to Adriaan Pienaar, Magnus Jepson & Mark Forrester of WooThemes! I started playing with the FreshNews theme nearly two years ago, added my own design elements, incorporated support for several prominent plugins, and added tremendous amounts of custom code to help you integrate your social media links, but ThrillingTheme wouldn’t be possible without their work. I’ve used WooThemes on nearly all of my sites and recommend their products highly to my clients & friends.

I also owe credit to Ptah Dunbar’s WP Framework, Jai Nischal Verma, and Vladimir Prevolac for design and code inspiration.

Tim McDaniels, Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks for the awesome TimThumb script, which does the heavy lifting for your custom snapshot photo & featured images.

Brooke Ferguson and Dwight Turner for letting me use their websites as playgrounds and Ryan Lei, Matt Lucas & Andrew Norcross for putting ThrillingTheme to the test.

Jun Loayza, David Damron, Paul Norwine and others for continually encouraging me to develop & release ThrillingTheme. It only took about 6 months!

And special thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team for developing an awesome blog platform/CMS and encouraging open source development.