Small Potato over at WP Designer has released a premium theme for showcases. It’s a very nice theme, although there are a couple things I would have done differently.
One is the CSS hover effect over the images. I think it would look better if the background had a little transparency allowing the image to still be seen. Or removing it and displaying the information below the images.
The second is the rating stars. I think these should have been customized for a better appearance. If this was a free theme, I wouldn’t expect them to be changed. For a premium one, I would. Here is one set that I created a while back: Simple Stars for WP-PostRatings Plugin. The plugin is already integrated into the theme.
The best part of this theme is that it’s customizable.
It comes with 5 different color schemes and 8 layout variations.
There is a demo available for Showcase.
There are three licensing options to choose from. Single Domain, Multiple Domain and Developer. Also, a credit removal option which costs a little extra.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 10:52 am
I actually thought about doing semi-transparent backgrounds for the hover menus. However, changing background opacity is not done the same way on all browsers. There’s a way to do it in IE and a different way to do it in Firefox, one of which yields invalid CSS.
About your suggestion to put the hover menu links below the thumbnails, that would take away the layout variations because some of the layouts depend on the thumbnails dividing evenly. If you look through some other screenshots. You’ll see what I mean.
Thanks for the post rating image tip. I’ll work on one.
Other than what you’ve mentioned. There’s some features that I didn’t get to package with this initial release. At the end of the day, Showcase is still in its infancy stage and will be an ongoing project.
Thanks for the plug Alisha :)
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:23 am
I actually didn’t take into consideration the browser issues, so I’m glad you did! Maybe someday all browsers will become friends and creating websites will be painless!
I am looking forward to seeing how the theme progresses.
Thank you for leaving a comment.