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.

Take for instance one of the most popular questions asked about customizing Atahualpa in the BFA Forum. How do I get Atahualpa to display full posts on archive pages instead of post excerpts? The answer is diabolically simple. Just download the index.php file from Atahualpa and save it as archive.php. Remove the part of the template that calls in The Wordpress Loop:

<?php /* This is the actual Wordpress LOOP.
The output can be edited at Atahualpa Theme Options -> Style & edit the Center column */
bfa_center_content($bfa_ata['content_inside_loop']); ?>

and replace it with loop code from the archive.php of a theme that displays full posts on the archive pages, such as the Wordpress Default theme:

<div <?php post_class() ?>>
<h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content() ?>
</div>
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>
</div>

You can edit this code as well. One thing you might want to do is replace <div class="entry"> with <div class="post-bodycopy"> so that the body text will follow the styling guidelines set by Atahualpa.

If you don’t want to display the time & date above the post, simply move or remove <small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>. If you don’t want the meta data to appear below your posts, simply remove that whole paragraph.

If you are familiar with Wordpress coding, then you know that <?php the_content() ?> is what displays the full post content.

When you are finished editing, just upload your new file and Wordpress will recognize and use it.

This also applies to using plugins that require you to add a piece of PHP code to one of your template files that Atahualpa does not come with. If the template doesn’t exist, just create it, upload it, and Wordpress will use it.

Diabolically simple, yet not obvious…

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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