Introducing Agregado: A Free WordPress Theme With Lifestream

Sep. 8, 2008

9:26 am

This is a pretty exciting post for me. A few months back, the folks over at Smashing Magazine approached esteemed WordPress theme designer Darren Hoyt (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is also my office-mate) about creating a free, high quality WordPress theme to be released as part of that site's free theme collection. Darren asked that I handle the back-end features while he rolled out the design.

Today, we're proud to introduce Agregado. While the theme boasts a whole slew of extra features and flourishes, the main attraction is the integrated lifestream carousel featured prominently on the homepage. Heavily indebted to Kieran Delaney's SimpleLife plugin, Agregado's lifestream accomodates all the major social networking sites – including Twitter, Pownce, Flickr, Facebook, Last.fm, Magnolia, Delicious, Goodreads, and four additional feeds of your choosing. The whole thing's nested in a snazzy little rotating carousel. Make your website the one place people think to look for everything you're up to online.

What else? Oh, plenty of fun stuff. Drop-down effects courtesy of jQuery, a built in contact form, and numbered pagination sprinkled throughout. And that's not to mention the off-the-charts electric-space vibe and clean UI of Darren's design.

So give it a look, kick the wheels, and make sure to let Darren and me know what you think. Stay tuned, too, because we've been talking up some really big ideas – some that extend the concepts behind the Agregado theme and some that'll take us into completely new territory. Whatever it is, you can count on me talking about it here – so grab the feed.

Comments

September 8, 2008

4:04 pm

One of the best themes I have ever seen, free or paid. Very good work :)

Terje Asphaug (#)

September 8, 2008

4:26 pm

Thanks very much, Terje. Darren and I had a lot of fun with this one, and I hope that shows.

Matt Dawson (#)

September 8, 2008

4:35 pm

Lawdy! It’s really impressive.

jackie c (#)

September 8, 2008

7:38 pm

Amazing work! One of the best themes I’ve ever seen… no joke!

NiKo (#)

September 8, 2008

8:35 pm

Great Theme..!!!!

Oscar (#)

September 8, 2008

9:37 pm

Thanks all. It’s been kind of a fun day, what with all the support requests and tweaks.

I thought I should mention here that Darren and I made some small but helpful changes to the theme based on some of the issues we encountered in the first few hours post-launch. If you’re running a copy that you picked up right after launch, it might be worth it to download the most recent version. To upgrade, all you need to do is overwrite your old version with the contents of the updated zip.

Matt Dawson (#)

September 9, 2008

11:27 am

Looks pretty rawrsome. Could displace PressRow…

Jason (#)

September 15, 2008

11:22 am

Very interesting. love all the new plugins and information about themes and all that stuff. Thanks

Mac @ Motorcycle Fairing (#)

September 22, 2008

4:04 pm

Agregado is a great theme, I use it for my lifestream site. But I have a problem with twitter. I am sure that I typed total correct twitter feed in the option. But the lifestream sidebar didn’t show my tweet. I don’t konw if I have explained it clearly. But if you can figur out, please help me!

kevin (#)

September 22, 2008

4:11 pm

@Kevin - I have an idea what might be causing the problem. I’ll send you an email so we can troubleshoot.

Matt Dawson (#)

September 29, 2008

6:56 am

I just want to say Bravo! I write a blog where I post Wordpress themes that I’ve found, tested and that I think are well done. Well I downloaded your new theme yesterday and I was so impressed with it that I’m using it on my website now.
I have to say that it’s the best Wordpress theme that I’ve seen so far. I’m not just saying that either it seriously kicks ass. There are so many unique features and I love the Lifestream component.
I just wanted to let you know personally that I think you did a great job on the back end and I think it was great that you guys decided to give this away for free. Now I think you two should get together again and design a Premium Wordpress theme and make some well deserved money. I’ll be your first affiliate. Haha!  Thanx and Take care!

DivaGeek (#)

October 4, 2008

9:44 am

I love all the plugins and the themes are pretty amazing! Thanks.

-M from Mexico

Mayan Palace Riviera Maya (#)

October 5, 2008

8:44 am

Hello again..I’m currently working on a custom version of your theme so I have it turned off for now but I needed to ask you a question because I can’t seem to figure it out myself. I know your busy but anyways maybe you can help.
How do you change the headlines on the home page to excerpts instead of just the titles of the posts? I’ve tried a few things but I’m no expert when it comes to PHP.
I got it working on the most recent post to show images using excerpt reloaded but when I tried to erase everything under that hoping that would do it..well that didn’t work at all. Haha! Help? Anyone is welcome to help.

*desperate.

DivaGeek (#)

October 7, 2008

2:52 am

I’m having a similar problem to Kevin. All the feeds work fine except my tweets don’t appear. Is it just me, or is there a public fix?

indi (#)

October 7, 2008

8:03 am

@indi - The first thing to check is that you’re using the right link to your feed. This’ll look something like “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/773709.rss”.

If the feed address is correct, go into the theme folder. Inside, you’ll find an “includes” directory. Within that directory is a cache folder. Delete it. Then refresh your front page.

The much-publicized issue with twitter is that it goes down. A lot. If your site makes a request at a moment when twitter’s either down or under heavy load, the cache may get created without twitter included. That cache will persist until the time limit you’ve specified in the options panel ends.

Matt Dawson (#)

October 11, 2008

10:44 pm

Anyone? Even just a link to instructions on how to post more then one post on the main page would be so awesome. I’ve tried using excerpts reloaded.
I’ve tried a few things but nothing seem to work. Any suggestions?

Divageek (#)

October 12, 2008

12:33 am

in index.php there are two loops with counts, the first loop is set to 1, which you can change, as well as the sevond one. in home.css i found that you need to remove the headlines li styling. On a mobile now but can post the code if you need

indi (#)

October 19, 2008

12:21 pm

Hey, Great Theme! Even after considering paid options, I chose Agregado beacuse it is just that awesome. Anyways, I’d like to modify my homepage so that more than the first most recent post is displayed full text, and change it to display the latest 5 posts, with the next 5 are shown as headlines at the bottom. I’ve been doing my research and understand how it is initially built, but can’t figure out how to add more posts? Ideas appreciated.

Cap (#)

October 23, 2008

8:19 am

Awesome Theme! Love it so much!

Markus (#)

November 6, 2008

2:25 am

I took your theme (because i love the interface of it, absolutely AMAZING) and just skinned it and added in a little of my own touches.. check it out and tell me what you think :) Also I will be adding credit in a “special thanks” section of the site rather than the footer, if that’s okay with you (i like to be a little more personal in giving credit than just a backlink).

Clay McIlrath (#)

Whaddya think?