A Glance at JustSimple WordPress Theme

November 7, 2007

I just stumbled on a WordPress theme called JustSimple, and I could say from the first look: "I will use it".

Good things about JustSimple

This theme, regardless of having only 2 images, 1 for background, and 1 for the RSS feeds, look so elegant and easy on the eyes. As the name suggests, JustSimple is a simple lightweight WordPress theme.

Take a look at the screen-shot below:

This is exactly what I wanted. A simple but good looking theme for fast loading.

Some Problems with JustSimple

This is 800px width on a 1024px wide screen. There is one problem in layout, the whole container is fluid. The smaller the screen, the more the container get narrowed and the height of the page increase. This should be fixed otherwise it look bad when the browser window is resized. Like this:

After all the look and feel, I liked it and I tried it, here is a screen shot of my homepage when using this theme before any modification:

Beside the layout issue the theme also got a bug on it right on the Index page:

Warning: array_key_exists() [function.array-key-exists]: The first argument should be either a string or an integer in D:\Program Files\AppServ\www\binh.name\wp\wp-includes\category-template.php on line 176

The bug was actually found in the index.php file, on line 19. It can be easily fixed by inserting one more condition in the if statement:

• Old: <?php if ( in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>
• New: <?php if ( $AsideId && in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>

Reason (warning, developer stuff) The $AsideId is null causing the in_category call passing a null argument, which throw the exception.

Conclusion

This theme design absolutely exactly perfectly specially is what I really wanted for so long time. You should expect this theme up and running for my Binh's Creative Blog soon. I have spent quite sometime on tweaking it. There still are some more things to do to make it more SEO friendly.

Stay tuned to see when it is implemented and how it look on my site. When completed I will also include a link to download my version of this theme for your own use. If you have some review on this theme, please feel free to post a comment. I will put some do-follow plug-in soon.

Tags: Theme, WP