Recently Martin of GHacks decided to redo his site with a custom theme, which received a very positive response. It is definitely a nice looking theme in my opinion and figures to be one that other sites would consider using for their theme if available.

As of yesterday, it looks Martin has made this theme available for download to anyone that is interested, under the condition that you leave the link in your footer. You can find the instructions here. It also comes stock ready for several popular WordPress plugins:

  • AdSense Paster – The easiest way to add AdSense to your blog. Download the plugin from the website above and ftp it into your wordpress plugin directory. After that you simply create the code on the Google AdSense website and paste that code into the ads_0.php file that resides in the plugin directory. Once you have done that activate the plugin in Wordpress and watch as the ads appear on the top left of your articles.
  • GHacksAdvanced Search Lite – If you want to enable site search you need this plugin. As usual, just download the plugin from the above website, ftp it to your plugin directory and activate it in your Wordpress plugin administration.
  • CSS Compress – Compresses the css file which speeds up browsing for your visitors and saves bandwidth. As usual, download, ftp and activate in Wordpress. No additional work involved.
  • Head Meta Description – Takes an excerpt from the first paragraph and adds it as the meta description.
  • My Avatars – If you want to display avatars next to the comments than you need to download and activate this plugin.
  • Optimal Title – probably the most important plugin for search engine rankings. Just install and activate.
  • Simple Tagging – used to tag posts, display related posts and keywords to the meta tags. Just install and activate again.
  • Spam Karma – the antispam plugin that I’m using. If you use another plugin keep using it, don’t think that makes much of a difference.
  • Subscribe to Comments – Gives your visitors the option to subscribe to comments to receive an email whenever a new comment appears in the article.
  • Text Link Ads Plugin – If you want to use text link ads on your blog you should download and install the text links wordpress plugin. Just download and activate the plugin, it will be automatically displayed in the sidebar.
  • WP Cache – If you have a high traffic blog you need this plugin which caches pages for a certain amount of time reducing database load immensely. You need to turn of GZip compression in your options though to be able to use this plugin.
  • Page Navi – Uses numbers instead of previous and next in the page navigation. Just activate the plugin, everything else is set.
  • Dropdown Cats – Displays the categories in a neat dropdown menu in the sidebar.

I like when people show the WordPress spirit by making their theme available for anyone to use on their respective sites, and have considered doing that with the theme for this site for awhile now. Only problem is I’m not sure if anyone would be interested.