Dilectio: A Smashing WordPress Theme

Update (22.12.2007): the theme had some comment errors; Elena has just fixed them. Please download the new version, you’ll find the links below.

Over the last year Elena Gafita, the creative mind behind Design Disease team, has designed a number of free WordPress themes, as the Smashing WordPress Theme we released as a present for our readers during our One-Year-Anniversary in September’07. Afterwards we’ve contacted Elena and asked if it’s possible to design another WordPress theme for our readers. Elena agreed.

After we’ve discussed the details of the design and the main aims we wanted to achieve, Elena started to do her magic. The result is a fresh, clean, user-friendly and playful WordPress theme “Dilectio” — a smashing Christmas present for Smashing Magazine readers. In the following, Elena describes how the design was created and what the theme has to offer.

Please notice that all images are clickable and lead to the demo-version of the theme. You’ll find the preview- and download-links in the end of the article. There you’ll also find a bonus present for our Smashing readers.

[Offtopic: by the way, have you ever visited Smashing Magazine's List of tags? There might be something interesting for you.]

Dilectio: A Smashing WordPress Theme

Dilectio WordPress Theme: an overview

This new theme was a quite different challenge for me, because the guys from Smashing Magazine asked something and I quote “simple, beautiful and user-friendly”. I don’t know whether I succeeded in meeting these requirements or not, but what you have in front of you is what came out of it.

Dilectio comes from the Latin Language and it means “love, solicitude, esteem”. It’s a rather atmospheric theme and to achieve this effect I started my scratch from with something that might be identified with this kind of feeling. The element I am talking about is the rounded shape that is repeating randomly, creating a beautiful and original rhythm. I’ve created “About this Blog” area just to give this identifiable element that a site needs, an area that many will remember.

Main content area and horizontal navigation.

Unordered bullets, headers and comments in the content area.

The comment area.

Being a designer, it’s not very common to me to write too much; it’s better to present what this theme offers and how one can use it.

Main Features

• 3 Column Theme
• Widget-ready – two sidebars (both sidebars are supporting widgets, but I recommend to use the second one from the right margin.
• The data of the section “About this blog” is stored in the file about-blog.php, which is located into the main theme directory (see the screenshot below).
• The theme is using 5 plugins; 4 of them are integrated into functions.php, so there is no need to install them. These plugins are WP-PageNavi, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Gravatar and FlickrRSS. You can use the last one to present your Flickr images in a Flickr Photostream (see the screenshot below).

“About this blog”-section includes an Intro, search, links to RSS-feeds.

This is how Flickr Photostream may look like.

Support queries are only answered on my blog and not in this release post. Please don’t e-mail me or contact with support requests.

Preview and Download

• Blog entry regarding the release of the theme, on DesignDisease.com
• Preview Dilectio Theme (DesignDisease.com)
• Download Dilectio Theme (0.18 Mb)

The Dilectio Theme is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This means that you may use it for your personal and commercial projects and you may also make any changes — just don’t remove the credits in your footer.

A Happy New Year to everyone!

Elena — Design Disease

Bonus: Dilectio Wallpaper

[Editors:] Elena has also designed a wallpaper dedicated to the Dilectio theme. We’re genuinely happy to offer a Smashing Dilectio Wallpaper for our readers as bonus of the WordPress theme. You can also download the wallpaper (see the rescaled version below) in a .zip-package (0.1 Mb).

Dilectio WordPress Theme: Wallpaper, .png, 1024×768, 96 KB

Thank you for your work, Elena.

Smashing holidays, folks!