Atahualpa from Bytes For All just might be the most impressive free Wordpress theme available to date.

Much like the Thesis theme from DIY Themes, you get a complete back-end interface for customizing the theme. However, Thesis starts at $87 for the Personal license, and Atahualpa is free.

The most important thing to know about how to customize Atahualpa is that you can create your own PHP templates for pages such as multi-post archives (including category & tag pages), search results, single posts, etc. People are often confused by the fact that the theme does not come with templates such as archive.php, search.php, single.php and others that you might expect, but what is not entirely obvious is that you can create these templates and upload them, and Wordpress will automatically use them.

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I see a lot of people asking how to make their Wordpress site accessible from the root directory folder. In most standard installations, Wordpress is installed in a sub-folder and the only way to access the site is to add that sub-folder name to the site’s URL.

If you read the wordpress.org support forum you’ll find posts suggesting that you move the Wordpress index.php file to the root folder and change a few things in that file. You’ll also see replies from people who have tried it unsuccessfully.

Here’s a little trick that will allow you to access your Wordpress site from the root URL without moving or modifying any of the Wordpress installation files. This method will “hide” the Wordpress installation’s folder name when people access your home page but they will see the folder name in URLs when they start clicking around…

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WOT (Web of Trust) is a free Internet security addon for Internet Explorer (PC only) and Firefox (Mac or PC). This utility allows you to rate web sites for trustworthiness and will warn you before you enter an untrustworthy site. The simple setup offers three levels of protection:

• Light – Rating icons are shown only for dangerous sites, No pop-ups
• Basic (Recommended) – Rating icons shown for all sites, Search Results ratings shown in pop-up window
• Child Safety – Blocks access to sites that contain adult language and content, All unrated sites are blocked

Set to Basic default, WOT will warn you if you attempt to connect to any sites that have a poor level of Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, or Privacy. A “poor” or “very poor” rating in any area will trigger a warning. When child safety mode is in place, it will also block sites that contain mature or inappropriate content.

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Clients occasionally ask me what’s the difference between setting up a web site on wordpress.com as opposed to downloading Wordpress from wordpress.org and installing it on your own server. Of course the answer is that there are many. Here are some…

Domain Name

• By installing Wordpress on your own server, you can drive traffic to your own domain and increase your web site’s overall search engine ranking.
• On wordpress.com you can buy a domain name for $15 per year or map to an existing domain name for $10 per year. If you don’t have a domain of your own and don’t wish to purchase one, you can have a subdomain on wordpress.com (e.g. http://yoursitename.wordpress.com) for free.

Installation & Setup

• Setting up on wordpress.com is as simple as providing a valid email address and filling out an online form. Just about anyone can do it.
• Installing Wordpress on your own server can also be very simple. Many web hosts provide an automatic installer, which again only requires completing an online form. I like Lunarpages because for only $4.95 per month you can get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and an unlimited number of subdomains, add-on domains, POP email addresses, and databases. They also have an automatic installer that allows you to set up multiple instances of Wordpress whether on one domain or different domains.

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Basically, unless you are a very good coder, you should forget that you ever heard of this theme. Here are some of the reasons why:

It is not widget-ready and the sidebar is not contained within <UL> or <OL> tags.

The single post template (single.php) does not call in the sidebar, so when a user goes to an individual post the navigation disappears.

single.php also contains over a dozen validation problems. The Minima theme that alternate0 is based on does not use the single.php template, so I can only assume that the person who adapted this template was a terrible coder. If you haven’t invested any time in this theme it might actually be easier to start with the Minima theme and customize it to look like alternate0. They are very similar.

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