Blog name & tagline can easily be moved to the top of the sidebar to allow room for Google AdSense® ads above the main content.

The default colors are black, white, gray, blue, brown, and purple. The stylesheet is easily customizable to create your own color scheme.

The easiest way to change the Arinesce logo image (upper left) is to create a new image called Arinesce-Logo.png at 210×100 pixels and upload it in place of the Arinesce logo.

To add or remove header images simply upload or delete them from the Arinesce/images/header/ folder. The images should be 700×120 pixels. Images load randomly, which means that it is possible for the same image to appear two or more times in a row. The more images you have in the folder, the less likely it is for this to happen. If you do not want your header image to change, simply leave only one image and the rotator script in the folder. Do not delete the rotator script unless you change the header background image path in the stylesheet.

Check Out a live demo! (Click this link again to see the header image change)

Download Arinesce Beta 3 (282) (109k zip file)

If you experience any problems with this theme or have questions, please leave a comment below.

Changelog:
2010 – April 1: Released Arinesce Beta 3 (282) (109k zip file)

• Added support for random header background images
• Fixed a minor CSS issue that caused the main background image not to repeat on pages with content shorter than the sidebar

2010 – April 1: Released Arinesce Beta 2 (284) (102k zip file)

• Author URL changed to http://johnnasta.com/blog/?s=arinesce
• Footer hover color changed & footer narrowed by 10px
• Added Recent Posts and Tag Cloud to static sidebar
• Added header background image w/ blog name & tagline for user friendliness
• Three additional header images are supplied with the theme
• Moved Arinesce logo to sidebar

2010 – March 31: Released Arinesce Beta 1 (315) (36k zip file)

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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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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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.

Disk space

• You get 3GB of disk space for free on wordpress.com. You can add 5 GB for $20/year, 15 GB for $50/year, or 25 GB for $90/year.
• On your own domain, you potentially have unlimited disk space. With Lunarpages, unlimited disk space costs $4.95/month, $59.40 per year, or $118.80 for 26 months (approximately $4.57/month).

Advertising

• When you install WordPress on your own server, you can host ads and generate income from your site.
• When your site is on wordpress.com, WordPress places ads on your site (they only show to visitors who are not logged in). If you don’t want the ads on your site, that will cost you $30 per year.

Users

• When your site is on wordpress.com, you are limited to 30 users. If you want to remove the limit, it will cost you $30 per year.
• When you install WordPress on your own server, you can have an unlimited number of users.

Privacy Settings

• On wordpress.com, privacy settings allow you to make your site public, hide your site from search engines, or make your site only accessible by logging in.
• When you install WordPress on your own server, you can make your site public or hide your site from search engines, but making it only accessible by login requires a plugin.

Themes

• On wordpress.com, you can choose from over 60 themes, and you can customize the CSS.
• When WordPress is installed on your own server, you can choose from literally thousands of free themes, purchase premium themes, or design your own themes. You can also modify the CSS as well as the theme scripts, which allows you to modify a stock theme to make it look completely original. Checkout the WordPress Themes Directory. You can also search Google or other search engines for Free WordPress Themes.

Widgets & Plugins

• On wordpress.com you can choose from about 25 widgets. WordPress adds widgets to the list by popular demand. You can’t install plugins.
• When you host your own WordPress site you can choose from thousands of free plugins that add functionality to your blog including email subscription managers, shopping cart, database tools, social bookmarking, photo galleries, event calendars, the list goes on and on. Many of these plugins include widgets that allow you to display additional information in the sidebar along with the standard WordPress widgets. Check out the WordPress Plugins Directory. You can also write your own plugins and widgets, or have custom plugins and widgets developed for you.

Upgrades

• On wordpress.com upgrades are done automatically. You don’t even have to think about it.
• On your own installation you simply click a link to upgrade WordPress or your plugins. Since version 2.7 there is no need to upgrade manually or install an automatic upgrade plugin. Automatic upgrading is built in.

Now that you know many of the differences, what do installing WordPress on your own server and hosting your site on wordpress.com have in common?

• Create web pages, blog posts, or both
• Pages and posts can be public or private (require user privileges)
• Subscribe via RSS
• On-site search engine
• Allow users to add comments
• Upload and insert media
• Add links to your favorite sites
• Your site can be public or private (hidden from search engines)
• Same great support forums
• Akismet spam filtering (optional on your own installation)
• Import content from other blogs
• Export content from your blog to another blog
• Multiple user levels (visitor, subscriber, contributor, author, admin)
• Delete your site at any time

Still can’t decide? Then start a site on wordpress.com, get your feet wet, and see if you want to dive in. It’s totally free to begin and you don’t have to register a domain name or find a hosting company. You can always export your content into a WordPress installation on your own server if you decide to do that at a later time. Conversely, if you find that hosting your own installation hasn’t worked out for you, you can always migrate it to wordpress.com.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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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.

It is set to a fixed width of 700px, which wastes a lot of screen space for most users.

The links in the header are hard-coded and need to be manually changed in order to be of any use.

It does not contain any RSS links.

The comments.php file has Google ads hard-coded into it and you’ll have to know how to remove them.

comments.php also contains a hard-coded link to a subscription management page on the author’s site and a “subscribe to comments” checkbox that doesn’t work. Both have to be removed.

The sidebar contains hard-coded links to the author’s sites under “Good Reading” and the “Alternate0 is based on…” credits. You’ll also want to remove the “Your Google Ads Here” text while you’re at it. The sidebar is full of junk that you’ll want to get rid of, yet doesn’t include things that would be desirable such as Recent Posts, Links, Pages, and Meta sections.

The sidebar Categories drop-down has a hard-coded /blog/ path, so if your WP installation is not in a folder called “blog” the drop-down will not work.

The footer.php also contains hard-coded links to other sites.

The CSS does not contain several required classes including alignleft, alignright, aligncenter, and wp-caption.

The theme comes with files called templates.php and testimonials.php that appear to be there for no reason other than to promote the author’s other themes and socio-political agenda.

The authors did not respond when I tried to reach them by email, and a comment on the ThoughtMechanics web site in which I politely asked for some help with this template was apparently deleted from the moderation queue without being published or responded to.

In short, it looks nice but be prepared to do a lot of hacking to make it usable.

I am working on fixing this theme because I have a client who likes the way it looks. I’ve gotten all of the above fixed except for the disappearing navigation on single posts, which I am having trouble getting to line up properly (that’s what my question to the authors was about). I also have not made it widget ready because so far my client hasn’t had any need for that, and I have to concentrate on what they do need first. Once it’s fixed I will make it available to others. In the meantime this theme is not one that you can expect to simply unzip and use. I will also try to work some of the WP v.2.7+ features into it such as comment threading. This template was written in 2005 and I have to assume that the author has abandoned it.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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This can cause unexpected formatting problems, especially when inserting the “More” tag, changing themes, or when your content is reproduced in RSS readers or elsewhere.

The best way to avoid this is to copy & paste your post in as plain text. In the “Edit” and “Add New” screens for both posts and pages, make sure you have Visual mode selected. In Visual mode you will see a row of icons for formatting your text. The farthest icon to the right is called “the kitchen sink”. Click that icon and a second row of icons appears. One of them is a clipboard with the letter T on it. That is the one for posting as plain text. That’s the one to use. To the right of that icon is a clipboard with a W on it. That one is for pasting from MS Word. It removes most of the Microsoft code but not all of it, and therefore I don’t recommend it.

If you need more text formatting options than your two rows of icons offer, download the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, which will give you icons for creating tables and other advanced formatting features.

So, you have a bunch of posts with all sorts of formatting code in them from Microsoft. How do you get rid of the “junk code”? Just highlight the entire post, and use the icon to the right of the “paste from Word” icon. It looks like a white eraser and if you hover your mouse over it, you’ll see that it says “Remove formatting”. Works like a charm! Switch from Visual to HTML mode and you’ll see that all the Microsoft code is gone.

If you generally don’t like the way a font displays within your theme, adjust it in the stylesheet, not within the post or page.

Keep it clean and simple!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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