Neutica is a lightweight, two (five?) column, widgetized, Wordpress theme designed completely with CSS, sans image graphics. The design is based on the sometimes overly popular yet classic font: Helvetica Neue. Neutica is ideal for mini-magazine publishing or standard blog publishing. This was built with Sandbox — a valid XHTML / CSS selector rich Wordpress environment. Neutica was developed for WordPress 2.5+, but it should also work in 2.3.+. It has been tested mostly in Safari and Firefox but it should also maintain its look in IE 6 and IE 7 outside of a few font discrepancies.
Demo
Check out a live demo of Neutica here.
Screenshots
Check out a few screenshots.
Download
PLEASE READ THIS before you download Neutica: This theme does not cost you a dime. All I ask is that you please keep a link back to allancole.com/wordpress as it requires in the license below. Also, if you have questions about Wordpress please visit the WordPress Documentation or Support Forums. If you find bugs, I will try my best to help you with them. Just leave a comment below or email me. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to help you customize this theme but I am open to suggestions for features that you may want to see in future updates.
Download Neutica Theme 1.0.9
Updated to version 1.0.9 which fixes the colors.php CSS issue.
I will be updating this theme from time to time so subscribe to the feed to stay up to date.
Features
- The Neutica theme admin has options to alter the default colors of this theme.
- This theme was built entirely with CSS which mean there are no heavy theme images to slow down your site.
- For users who have the full version of the font: Helvetica Neue installed and activated on their machines, the headers and sub headers will display in HEAVY, BLACK and LIGHT weights, giving the theme an even cleaner look.
- I have tweaked the original Sandbox theme to suit the needs of this design, however much of the power of sandbox is left in tact. Follow this link to find out more.
Installation
To install, open the Neutica Theme folder and upload the contents of the plugins folder to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory. Upload the neutica folder to your wordpress/wp-content/themes folder. Then open your Wordpress Admin, activate the plugins under the Plugins tab, and select the Neutica theme under the Design tab (or Presentation tab in versions prior to Wordpress 2.5).
Modifications
There is only a few minor and optional changes that you can make to this theme.
- Featured Posts - This theme requires a category called Feature to operate correctly. The theme will then pull the latest post in that category and load it into the Feature section of the homepage.
- Post Images - Almost all of the images in this theme are loaded automaticaly. There are no Custom Field Keys/Values to worry about. Neutica will automatically grab the latest uploaded image attachment and use its thumbnail for the archive and home pages. Same goes for the Feature posts except it grabs the full resolution image for the background. Just make sure that you go to SETTINGS > MISCELLANEOUS and set the thumbnail size to 185px x 185px. That’s it.
- Tabbed Sidebar - The content in the Tabbed sidebar can be changed to whatever you like. In later versions, i will try to widgetize the tabs themselves, but for now it has to be done manually by editting the sidebar.php. The Tabbed content has its own widget section called “Tabbed Sidebar”. To get rid of the Tabbed Sidebar, just add a widget to it and it will replace the tabs.
Plugins
Neutica uses 1 simple plugin, which is included in the download. It is highly recommended, but not necessarily required.
- WP-Typogrify (included) — Helps to make web type conform to printed type standards.
Future Versions
The one update I plan on doing will implement a better way to manage the Tabbed Area so that you don’t have to dig into the code. As usual I am always open to suggestions or help with improvements. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
License
Neutica is Copyright © 2008 by Allan Cole. It is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. Basically you can do whatever you like with this theme. I only ask that you please give credit where credit is due by providing a link back to my site: http://www.allancole.com/wordpress.
ENJOY.
I am having trouble getting my media to show up. (Audio files and movies) It let’s me add them and uploads them properly, but when I publish they do not show up. Anyone have this issue or know how to fix it
Thanks,
Chelsea http://www.hirechelsea.com/blog
Hi Chelsea,
Loving the color scheme you’ve got going! I am not sure why the media isn’t showing up. Sounds like more of a Wordpress issue than a Neutica issue(I may be wrong). Videos are better handled with plugins in Wordpress. I recently found this one for videos. And try this plugin for the audio.
Thanks for checking out Neutica!
I have a problem with the installation script on line 327 .. This listing:
// Theme Switcher
function widget_themeswitch($args) {
extract($args);
?>
<?php
}
register_sidebar_widget(‘Theme Switcher’,
‘widget_themeswitch’);
what problem/error in listing please??
on this part is wrong
Hi Rizal,
Simply deleting those lines of code from your functions.php file should fix your issue. Where did you download Neutica from? I though that I had deleted those lines from the latest version.
Let me know. Thanks.
hey allan
thanks for the reply, but i cannot figure out how to get the comments to appear below the post.
im new to this stuff and am having a hard time figuring it out. any more specific help would be really appreciated.
Thanks a lot
Hi Allan,
Thanks so much for designing this great layout. I have been modifying it to my liking for a couple of weeks now. The only real problem I have run into is with ul and ol tags. When I try to make a list within a post, there is a line after every item. As far as I can tell, this has something to do with the lines in the sidebar sections, post info box, etc. Diving into the style sheets, though, I can’t find where the underline command is. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Hi Jack,
Thanks for checking out Neutica. Your tweaks are looking great!
The ol and ul border styles you are looking for are in the colors.php file. That file also controls the theme color options so be careful when editing.
I have two questions regarding Neutica, which I must say is a fantastic theme.
The first is, how can I change the color of the ordinary text? The color changer in the theme settings can change the background and large fonts’ colors, but not the bodies of the text, which remains black. I’d like to be able to change that, but I can’t seem to figure it out (I’m not good at CSS).
Finally, is there any way I could change the text in something? Say I am writing music reviews, and I want to use tags as a convenient way to organize my reviews by artist or label or both. Would it be possible to change where it says ‘tagged as’ to ‘artist’ or something like that? That’d make it look just a small bit neater.
Ideally, I’d like there to be another field in that side bar, one for artist and one for label, maybe even another for year, but now we’re getting into something that seems to be impossible using Wordpress, and also, something not related to your theme much.
Anyway, thanks.
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for checking out Neutica! Hmm. The theme options should allow you to change all of the text. So, I tried it out and you are right, the text color doesn’t change everywhere. It’s definitely a Neutica issue. Good catch! I will work on a fix ASAP.
You’ll need to edit almost all of your theme files to make that ‘artists’ edit across the board. If you aren’t used to PHP/HTML coding it may be a bit too difficult for you.
Hope that helps!
Hey,
I love this theme, but everything comes up as Read More no matter what I choose. I followed your instructions and deleted the code from home.php but that just got rid of the button and didn’t open up my posts at all.
Any ideas?
I have the same problem.
Help please.
The widgets appear buggy: If I manually remove all widgets from sidebars 2 and 3, they are automatically populated with widgets, but these don’t show up in the current widgets list. If I add a widget, only that widget appears.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for using Neutica!
The widgets aren’t buggy. Sandbox comes with default widgets built into the sidebar. All you need to do is add en empty ‘Text Widget’ to any sidebar that you would like to be left blank. Should do the trick.
I like your design but it is not playing well with NextGen Gallery. I made thumbs 185X185 but it only displays [Single pic not found] BTW thumb sixe settings are in SETTINGS > MEDIA in WP 2.7.1
Thanks Jack.
I’ve never used NextGen Gallery before so I’m not sure how it works. It does sound like its clashing with Neutica. Maybe you should try another gallery plugin?
Thanks for your attention (reply). i have delete that listing and thats work..thanks.
but i have new problem. how to show the “future:” and”image…behind the future:”
in your sample theme you show “future” and BW image.
Hi there, I love your Neutica theme! I know you said that you cannot modify it, so any chance you have a very similar simple theme like Neutica, but with formatting for adsense adds? Or if I payed you would you please be able to modify formatting for adsense adds into my Neutica theme.
Also, are you able to use favicons with Neutica?
From Laura
Any theme including Neutica can work with adsense ads. You can use text widgets to add any type of coding to your site. Do some simple Google searches and I am sure you will find some tutorials on it.
Thanks for using Neutica
why yellow ????
wihte will looking much better
Allan,
Curious, how do you put an image at the top of a post? looked high and low.
Also I noticed on your demo page, home page, in the tabs section below the menu bar, (you follow me? lol) you put comments in there. How do I add stuff to those tabs?
Thanks man, Cee
Hi CeeHo,
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘top of post’. Please clarify.
You will need to edit the sidebar.php file to add coding to the tabbed widget. You may need to dig around the WP Forums to find some other function calls that you can use in the same manner.
Hi Allan,
So, lets start with me telling you how much I like this theme, and then I’ll move on to my question.
I’m going to use your theme for a Swedish blog, and therefore I’m translating this whole thing - that’s not a problem, but there is one thing I cannot figure out.
In Swedish, a headline is “Written like this”, and “Not Like This”. See the difference?
So my question is how do I change so that it only use a capital letter in the beginning of the first word? Thanks
Or rather just displaying the headline in whatever way I wrote it would be the best solution since you might need to write a name in it!
Thanks again!
Hi Mats,
.entry-title, .entry-title a {text-transform: none}Should do the trick.
Hi Allan, I also had a problem in fuctions.php, at line 327. I downloaded the template on this site! Anyway I deleted as you said, and now it’s working.
Hello! My problem: if I post a picture in the article, the picture preview is not shown in the main page. It only appears if I click on “readmore” and open the full article.
I need to know how can I see the picture on the main page, and if there is a way to read the full article on the main, disabling the “readmore” option.
Thank you very very much.
Hi Camilla,
Check out this comment for your solution. Unfortunately, Neutica wasn’t design to display the full article on the home page. It will pretty much break the site layout if you set it up to do so.
Hi Allan,
It’s my understanding that if I use any non-neutica widgets, it will erase the tabbed sidebar text box.
Is that tabbed sidebar available as a widget itself? I really like it, but I want to use some other widgets as well.
thanks, Shilo
Hi Shilo,
The tabbed section is kind of a work in progress. You can only add custom sections to the tabs by editing the sidebar.php file. You would have to add some of your own widget/plugin function calls to the tabbed sections. The way it is set up now, if you place any widgets in sidebar #1, it will replace the tabbed section. The next version will be alot easier to use.
You should turn the tabbed box into a independent widget. it’s WAY better than a text field widget and I bet a lot of people would use it.
I really want to use it but I don’t know enough to figure out how to widgetize it myself. I’ll post here if I figure manage to figure it out.
I must say, I could not agree with you in 100%, but that’s just my IMHO, which indeed could be very wrong.
p.s. You have an awesome template for your blog. Where did you find it?
Allan, this isn’t really for you, it’s for other neutica users.
I’m a total CSS/PHP beginner, but I’m having some luck tweaking this theme, and I thought I’d share my methods (in raging beginner-speak).
To put the meta information (posted by, date, category etc) and comments UNDER the blog post content instead of next to it, do the following:
In your WordPress Dashboard, Click on Appearance and select Editor.
When the editor opens up, Stylesheet is open for editing and all the theme files are listed along the right.
Ignore the open file stylesheet and look along the right column for the file “Single Post” (single.php).
Click on it to open it to edit.
Look for this tag:
Scroll down through the code until you see .
Cut ALL that code out including at the beginning and at the end.
(at this point, I pasted the code onto a blank word document JUST IN CASE)
Now.
Go back into single.php and look for .
Once you find it, scroll down through all the code until you see another tag that closes it.
Paste all the code you cut out earlier just before the new tag so the tags are nested.
Save, and refresh.
Viola! This will make your blog post meta info and comment fields below the content instead of next to it.
It still is all really skinny, and the content text area is still pretty narrow.
I’m working out how to expand those so it looks more balanced and there is a bigger content area to play with.
I’ll post updates as I figure them out.
ack! the tags didn’t show in my comment!
Allan, can you fix that?
Hi Shilo,
Unfortunately, the coding is lost. If you want to email me the source code, I will gladly add it to your comment.
A syntax highlighter for comments is coming soon. I’m just looking for the right plugin. THANKS!
what’s your email address? I can’t find it on your site and I doubt your contact box will allow me to send coding.