Arliss is an elegant theme with a clean, bright look and many options for customization. The home page centers around a large-format rotating banner, automatically populated from a category of your choice. Images are assigned using the built-in Wordpress Media Library, and resized on-demand. Already have a blog full of content? Thumbnails and banners work the minute you activate your theme.

Arliss includes a fully widgetized sidebar with support for all built-in Wordpress widgets — and a few of its own. Extra “sidebars” are placed on the header and post pages, ideal for ad placement using the widget of your choice. Virtually everything in Arliss can be customized: including the javascript-enabled menus, both dropdown and a unique “hop-up” header bar.

Arliss comes with our standard pledge of a bug-free experience, cross-browser support on all modern browsers, and continual free updates in the future. Still intrigued? Check out the full list of offered features below, or take the demo for a spin.

For a basic setup, Arliss installs like any other theme. If you’ve never installed a Wordpress theme before, follow our step-by-step guide.

Once standard installation is complete, you can maximize your experience by configuring Arliss’ custom settings. To begin, login to the Wordpress Admin panel and click on the ‘Theme Options’ link in the sidebar menu.

This will bring you to the ‘Customize Arliss Theme’ screen. This page contains options for modifying colors, images, and other appearance-related settings. There are four types of options on this page:

Colors

Color options accept an HTML hex number preceded by a pound sign (e.g., #ffe733). Many popular image and color programs will generate these hex numbers, including Adobe Photoshop. In addition, clicking the “…” button next to a color field will pop up a color-selection dialog.

Images

Blurbia themes use the built-in Wordpress Media Library for image uploading and management. Clicking the “…” button will launch the standard Media Browser used on the Edit Post screen. To choose an image, upload or select it, and click the ‘insert into post’ button. If you would like to use an image that is hosted elsewhere, or is stored in a specific folder on your server, simply type or paste the full URL to the image in the field, bypassing the Media Browser.

Image Display

This option lets you select a Centered or Tiled display style for the site background image. Centered will position the image horizontally centered, and vertically flush to the top of the browser. It is generally suitable for large-format images that fade into the  background color of the website. Tiled will repeat the image infinitely in both horizontal and vertical directions, creating a grid that fills whatever space the browser creates for it. It is generally suitable for smaller images that blend seamlessly into themselves.

Header Height

This option lets you explicitly define, in pixels, the size of a portion of the site. You can use this in conjunction with the logo and background images to precisely customize the appearance of your site’s header.

After setting these options to your needs, click on the ‘Settings’ item under ‘Theme Options’ in the menu sidebar. You may need to click the arrow icon next to ‘Theme Options’ in order for this to appear.

This will bring you to the ‘Arliss Theme Settings’ screen. This page contains options that modify the behavior of the theme’s User Interface. There are six sections:

Menus

These settings affect the generation of Arliss’ three menus. The menus are created automatically from the Pages on your Wordpress site. If there are any Pages you do not want included in a menu, simply include its ID in the appropriate option. Multiple IDs should be formatted as a comma-separated list.

Banners/Featured

These settings affect the home page. You can limit the top banner rotation to specific category, and choose between a random selection of posts or the four most recent. You can also limit the featured posts (the three at the bottom of the home page) to a specific category.

Category Dropdown

Arliss archive pages, and the home page, contain a category dropdown for browsing all categories. You can exclude specific categories from this list in the same manner as the menus, with a comma-separated list of IDs. You can also exclude all child categories automatically.

Ad Spaces

Ad Spaces in Arliss are widgetized areas that can have Ad Widgets placed and configured using the standard Wordpress Widgets editor (located under Appearance). If you do not intend to use these spaces, you can simply disable them by setting them to ‘Hide’ here.

Footer

These settings control the display of copyright information and various links in the footer. You can disable the Wordpress and Blurbia links here, if you prefer.

Other

This setting is a cosmetic option for a more “clean” look  on Wordpress Pages. If comments are disabled for a given Page, and this option is set to ‘Yes’, the comment box will be hidden entirely on that Page. If this option is set to ‘No’, it will display the standard ‘Comments are closed’ message below the Page content.

Finished choosing all your options? Your theme is now fully customized and ready to use.

What browsers are supported?

We currently support Firefox, Safari, and IE6+ on all our themes. By “support”, we mean that each page is tested in each browser, and coded to look and behave identically across them. It also means that if you find a bug specific to one of these browsers, we treat it[...] Continue Reading

How do I add thumbnail images to my posts?

Themes that make use of thumbnail images do so by leveraging Wordpress’ built-in Media Library. Anytime you upload an image from the ‘Edit Post’ screen, that image becomes an attachment of that post in the Wordpress database. By default, the theme will simply grab the first attachment it can find[...] Continue Reading

Are updates free?

Yes. One of our goals at Blurbia is to provide continual enhancement to all our existing themes at no extra cost for current and past customers. Whenever a theme you’ve purchased is updated, you can get the latest release by simply logging in and browsing to the theme’s product page.

Why is Wordpress 2.7 required?

The theme makes use of the advanced functionality that Wordpress 2.7 provides, such as threaded comments. At this time, backwards compatibility with prior Wordpress versions has not been included–however, 2.5 and 2.6 compatibility is slated to be released soon as  a free upgrade.

Are threaded comments supported?

Yes. Threaded comments are supported up to 10 levels (the maximum supported in Wordpress). Generally, we recommend 5 levels or fewer with this theme.

Can I customize every color?

Currently, no. Certain colors and images are customizable, depending on the theme, and do offer a great deal of flexibility in creating your own look. However, certain elements are fixed and would require editing of the stylesheets and/or source images in order to change.

(For greater customization, consider the developer’s license,[...] Continue Reading