Hackunamatata.com introduces you to its new wordpress theme.

Dark Appeal

The theme I’m going to publish today is “Dark Appeal”, a re-arrangement of FTW 2.0 by flisterz.
When I saw the original one, I tought that it was a well structured template, but without a great choice of colors.
Infact, it was mainly composed by greyed tonalities, with a lot of strange colors, from orange, to green, followed by a strange derivation of blue:

So I worked on. Firstly I replaced the colour palette, then changed calendar background and improved all the elements.
Now the top menu has got rounded corners and the navigation style is more coherent with the other parts of the header.

Speaking about the 3 sidebars, the one at the top can (and should) be used as-it-comes-out: post info (while we are reading an article), a short about (customizable by editing the file ‘intro.php’) with a right-flipped tab (linked to the ‘about/’ page by default), and the search form.
The anchors in the sidebar nearer to the contents are all gray. Because of this, a reader will be not so confused by all the links that fills your widgets (tags cloud, categories, recent comments and so on), paying more attention to the contents (and the eventually used “Related Posts” plugin).
The third sidebar however, has normal coloured links.

Remember that you can style almost everything. Just edit ‘style.css‘ as you want.

I’ve also improved the comments system, by separating Pingbacks and Comments (with a nice hack), and by disabiliting some unnecessary fields if the current visitor is logged in (inputs like name, email and url).

To-Do

I want to enable OpenID login for comments in one of the next version (thanks to the great wp-openid-plugin), with a look on usability (I met a lot of people that doesn’t know what Open ID is. And they’re not alone… I’m pretty sure).
Also a redesign of some parts could be intresting. For example, things like icons or forms, should be revisited.

Support and Features Request

Dark appeal runs perfectly on Firefox 2.0, Camino, Firefox 3.0 beta 4 and Safari. Haven’t tested with Internet Explorer so, please, leave me a feedback.

An important thing is communication. If you discover a problem, feel free to post it right down in the comments. This will be helpful for everyone.
I’ll try to do my best to provide fixes on this templates, but as a student and a Digital Divided (yep, I’m running over a dialup connection), I’ve got some problems.
Post as a comment your features requests. I’ll see what to do :)

How to help?

Other than simply using it, you can help the development of the theme by simply correcting my english mispells/errors. Better if using email (giovanni.piller on the magnifique gmail·com) or direct messages on twitter.
I think that this post is full of them.. :p

But have I to pay something?

Off course not! The theme on wich “dark appeal” is built on, was distributed as open for every modification, at the only condition to keep the links in the footer.

I would appreciate a small donation with PayPal, because also an euro/dollar is important!
Think about it.

Download and install

You can download the zip package here. Once you’ve unpackaged it, you only have to put the directory you’ll get into the themes directory of your wordpress installation (usally ‘wp-content/themes’). Then go to the administraton panel in the tab “Presentation” and enable it.

One more thing..

I’m based in the Northern Italy, so GMT +1 :)

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