Inspired by the well-known Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt, OpenBook is a free Magazine style WordPress theme, which doesn’t require you to manually edit a file.

I first realeased this theme in January, but at this time it was only available in French. So it is the very first English version.

Download OpenBook

Download OpenBook 2.2 WordPress Theme: zip archive

If you’re looking for a live demo, check out my personnal blog which uses this theme.

OpenBook Features

Here’s what you can expect in OpenBook theme:

• Magazine-style homepage, including 2 columns and SmoothGallery for your featured posts.
• 100% Gravatar compatible.
• Custom fields to insert images on the homepage gallery, on homepage posts and in categories posts.
• Magazine-style dropdown-menu for your categories.
• Not manual editing required. After installing the theme, you’ll find an OpenBook tab under Design, where you can set up the options for the theme, including featured posts, featured category, blog logo, number of posts to display on the gallery, categories to display on the blog homepage…
• If you hate Internet Explorer 6 as I do, you’ll probably be happy: OpenBook have an option which litteraly crash IE6 if checked. If unchecked, IE6 will not crash and people who (still) use it will see your blog just as other users.
• Compatible with Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6. (OpenBook is also probably compatible with other browsers like Konqueror, I just haven’t tested it myself)
• Widget-ready sidebar
• SEO-friendly titles
• Page templates for Links and Archives
• Compatible with WordPress 2.3 to 2.5.1

Installing OpenBook

OpenBook install is like installing any WordPress theme: Unzip the archive, and upload the openbook22-en directory into the wp-content/themes of your WordPress install.

Then, go to your WP administration panel, Design » Theme and select OpenBook.

Now, you should go to Design » OpenBook and fill the various fields:

• Your blog logo url
• ID of your featured category
• Number of posts to display in SmoothGallery.
• IDs of categories to display on the homepage.
• If you want to make any IE6 crash, just check the related checkbox.
• Number of posts to display on the homepage, by category

Configuring SmoothGallery

SmoothGallery is a very pretty mootools script by Jonathan Schemoul which display posts along with big images. In order to configure it, you must create a new category (In this exemple, we’ll call it featured) and report its ID to Design » OpenBook.

When you want to show a particular post in the SmoothGallery, just edit the post and check the featured category. Of course, you can add the post to other categories as well.

Now, you should define an image that will display in SmoothGallery. Juste create a custom field, give it featuredimg as key and your image url as value. Once saved, the post will be displayed in SmoothGallery.

The ideal SmoothGallery image size is 600*250 pixels. You can use different size, but the image will be cropped or will not fill all the available space.

Using custom fields to display images in posts

As I said above, it is possible to assign one or more image(s) to a post. Theses images will be displayed on the homepage, or in categories pages, depending of the custom field used.

Here’s the custom fields keys, and the place where the images will be displayed.

• featuredimg » The image will be displayed in SmoothGallery (Only if the related post is in the featured category)
• Image » The image will be displayed along with its related post, on the homepage.
• catimage » The image will be displayed in category pages. Ideal size is 125*125 pixels.

Please note

The OpenBook theme is (and will stay) 100% free. I also try to always help people who use it as much as I can. The only thing that I’m asking, is that you leave my link on the theme footer. Thanks in advance

Edit on July 3, 2008: I just wrote a simple tutorial for modifying OpenBook color scheme. You can read it here.