The next upgrade will be adding the author pages which should be added shortly

The settings for the contact form (address to send the email to, where to redirect eg. a thank you page, and the subject line for th email) are all configurable in the theme options page to save you looking through the PHP.

We’ve also added the new WordPress 2.8 template tag body_class() which adds a number of classes to the body tag to allow you to control the styling of different pages depending on certain criteria.

We’ll be updating our Profectus and Invictus themes later this week. The Artemis theme already comes with these pages. We’re also going to be adding single and multi authors page templates to allow you to easily create an author page for your blog with your profile data on it, and for multi author sites, a list of their posts as well.

If there are any other page templates that you’d like to see available please let us know and we’ll do our best to add them.

This is where child themes come in handy. The main theme is in its own theme directory as usual, this is the parent theme, and then your modifications sit in a separate theme directory and will override the parent theme where necessary. This way if you just want to change the styles or perhaps the way the header is displayed, you just copy over the files you wish to modify, change those and the original theme stays intact in the parent directory.

As with any theme, a child theme will always need a style.css file with the typical header to specify the theme details, plus one extra line to tell WordPress what its parent theme is e.g.

/*
Theme Name: Blog Themes Club
Theme URI: http://www.blogthemesclub.com/
Description: Child Theme built off Profectus
Version: 1.0
Author: BTC
Author URI: http://www.blogthemesclub.com/
Template: Profectus
*/

This, as you can see, is the theme details for the theme on Blog Themes Club. We’ve got our Profectus theme as the parent theme and then our own child theme to override certain sections.

We need one extra line in this style.css file to import all the styles from the parent theme as these do not get imported over by default. This is a standard CSS import line i.e.

@import url("../Profectus/style.css");

Then any additional styles for your theme can just go below all of this, along with anything you want to override in the parent styles. To override code in one of the theme files simply copy the file over to your child theme and make your changes in that. WordPress will automatically look for the files in the child theme before then going to the parent theme.

Of course if you update a theme file that gets updated in an upgrade then you will need to copy those updates over, but this is a much simpler way to keep your changes separate and to be clear on what files you have changed and what you haven’t.

The theme is a two column, left sidebar theme. It’s coded to strict semantic XHTML with additional accessibility links and features to ensure all your visitors can enjoy your site. It comes with a number of additional page templates for your archives, about page, links and a secure contact form. It will also have a theme options page to allow you to change your logo and header easily, and we hope to also include a few different colour schemes.

Click on the image above to see the full sized image

We’ve added in the new WordPress 2.8 template tags to ensure you can get the most out of the template and after each page and post are social bookmark icons to allow your visitors to bookmark your work and help promote your writing.

What do you think about the new Artemis theme? We’d love to hear your opinion on it