Professor Theme for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5

Professor was designed to focus on, and feature, written content. Originally aimed at essayists, professors, and windbags, the theme seeks to put text (and images) first and foremost, and create a pleasurable reading experience. To that end, the sidebar has been removed to lessen distractions, and all browsable taxonomies are in the footer, such as categories, tags, and archives.

Professor also offers a Featured Post as the first post on the page. The Featured Post is outside of the timeline of regular posts, so if you have a really big, epic post, perhaps even life-changing, you can be sure the important content isn't buried amongst posts about what you dreamed about while napping at your keyboard. Professor is also predominantly brown, a color I feel has been maligned in the past, but is gaining some recognition these days. If you don't like brown, scroll down to the Additional Bits section at the bottom of the page check out Blue Professor or download it from one of the links below.

Features

Demo

A live demo of Professor for WordPress 2.5 can be found here.
And a live demo of Blue Professor can be found here.

Download

Professor is available for WordPress 2.3 and 2.5. The only difference between the two is that gravatar support has been added to the 2.5 theme.

Professor Theme

Blue Professor Theme

Installation

Installation is straightforward, and follows the conventions of other WordPress themes. Simply upload the Professor folder and its contents to the 'themes' directory of your WordPress install. Log-in to your site, go to the admin panel, and under 'Design'(2.5) or 'Presentation'(2.3), activate Professor. That should do it!

In order to utilize the Featured Post section, you must first create a new category named 'featured'. If you do not do this, the Featured Post section of the site will be blank, and your site will look... odd. Once you have created the 'featured' category, simply assign the category to the post you want featured.

If you want to use post thumbnails, like you see in the demo and screenshot to the right, simply add the image you want to use at the beginning of the post and assign the image a class of thumbnail, like this:

<img src="http://path/to/images/image.jpg class="thumbnail" />

Additional Bits

Professor has been tested on a number of browsers, but by no means all of them. If you come across something strange please send me a screenshot, along with the operating system, browser, and browser version.

While I am a fan of brown, I realize that a good number of folks with otherwise good taste really aren't into the color. In the next couple of weeks, I'll bring out a couple other color themes for Professor, just sit tight (or jump into the CSS and make your own).

And yes, I made extensive, if not exactly judicious, use of the xmp tag (on *this page only*) because it works! And browsers support legacy, even though it was depricated back the ice age.

Feedback, Comments, and Questions

Shoot me an e-mail at themes@protocol7.net.
I can also be found in #wordpress on irc.freenode.net. My nick is pnts.

ChangeLog

April 25th, 2008

screenshot of Professor theme