Introducing Speedball. A clean and simple WordPress theme

Originally conceived as a WordPress photoblog, Speedball quickly morphed into a stripped down, type-centric design that puts content front and center. The name is a nod to my cat, Speedball. I’ve been looking for a way to immortalize him – so until I can string together enough cash to get a bronze statue made, this theme will have to suffice.

Speedball is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Feel free to download and modify as you see fit. All I ask is that you credit Buro at the top of the CSS file (or better yet, leave the credit in the footer).

View the demo

Download Speedball

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Installation instruction

  1. Download and unzip speedball.zip
  2. Upload speedball folder into your wp-content/themes/ directory
  3. Login into WordPress, click Appearance – Themes – to activate speedball

If using the contact page with the contact form plugin

  1. Go to Pages – Add new. Create a new page called Contact
  2. Download modified wp-contact-form plugin and unzip. The original plugin can be found here. If you want the contact forms to look as they do in the demo, you have to download the modified plugin, as I’ve added a div and shuffled some of the items.
  3. Upload wp-contact-form folder into your wp-content/plugins directory
  4. Click plugins – activate the WP-ContactForm plugin
  5. Go to Settings – Contact Form – set form preferences and DELETE ALL OF THE CODE IN THE STYLE BOX. If you do not delete the style code, it will interfere with the styles specified in the css file. Hit Update Options
  6. Go to Pages – Contact. Enter this code – %%wpcontactform%% – in the text field. Remember to save it.

Congrats, the contact page and contact form should be working properly now.

Widgets

The sidebar is 100% widgetized, which you can control by clicking Appearance – Widgets, from within your WordPress admin panel. If you elect to use the widgets, you will loose the nifty styling that is default for the pages nav (light grey/blue tab behind the about, contact buttons). Also, I recommend you use the configurable-tag-cloud-widget (WordPress 2.3+ only — found here) instead of the default WordPress cloud widget. The default cloud widget offers very little in the way of customization and displays poorly.

Images

The main content column is 470px wide. We need to set up your default image size to allow for easy posting and consistent design structure.

  1. Click Settings – Media and set your large size images to 470px wide and 700px tall (the height can be any number really – use your discretion). Thumbnail size and Medium size can be set to whatever you like, so long as they don’t exceed 470px in width.

Browser Support

Speedball has been tested in the following browsers:

  • FF 2+3
  • Safari 3
  • Chrome
  • Opera 9
  • IE 7

NOTE: This theme does not support IE6 (or anything below 7 for that matter). Supporting IE6 would only encourage its existence – it should have died long ago. If you’re looking for a theme that works with IE6, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Questions, Comments, Support

This is the 1.0 release of speedball. Feel free to email me if you have any questions/suggestions. That said, this is a free theme and as such support is not guaranteed.