Boumatic is a three column Wordpress child theme for the Thematic theme framework by Ian Stewart. Child themes are much better explained here but essentially they allow you to create theme layouts and designs without editing the source theme’s template files. Makes things really easy when it’s time to upgrade your theme files. The name, Boumatic comes from the concept of Boumas in typography. When reading, people can recognize words by deciphering the shape of a cluster of letters, not just the individual letters. Needless to say this is another type driven/minimal design. Although my main goal was to experiment with Thematic and find out how drastically the appearance could be changed with only CSS and a few hooks and filters. Boumatic has been tested mostly in Safari and Firefox in OS X but it should also maintain its look in IE 7+ outside of a few font discrepancies (Sorry Windows guys but this theme looks WAY better on Macs :-( ). This theme has NOT been tested for IE6 or eralier versions. Sorry.
Demo
Check out a live demo of Boumatic here.
Screenshots
Check out a few screenshots.
Download
Boumatic is available as a Free download under the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. Basically you can do whatever you like with this theme. No links back to me are required but I would greatly appreciate it.
Download Boumatic
Download Thematic
Installation
To install, Upload the unzipped boumatic folder to your wordpress/wp-content/themes folder. Then upload the unzipped thematic folder to your wordpress/wp-content/themes folder. Your wp-content folder needs both the boumatic and the thematic theme folders to work. Once that’s done visit your Wordpress Admin, select the Boumatic theme under the Design tab to activate it. That’s it!
This theme is offered ‘as is’ so I don’t support theme customization but I will gladly help you with any bugs that you may find. Just leave a comment about it below.
ENJOY.
24 Comments
Child themes seem to pop up more and more! I personally can’t wait for WP 2.7… that’s when things really take off!
Keep up the good work!
Thanks Cristi!
Yeah 2.7 is definitely going to change the game. I believe It’s coming sometime in Nov. Can’t wait!
Allan, Boumatic is ridiculously beautiful. Great job. I love it.
I concur.
Thanks Ian. Couldn’t have done it without ya! ;-)
hi Allan, really nice job & design. Thematic is an absolute dream to work with. (You seriously ROCK Ian)
I also can’t wait for the official release of WP 2.7 and the ability to post child themes in the Wordpress theme directory. Again, really nice work!
Thanks Marti. Wp 2.7 is going to change the game. The beta version out now is incredible!
Looks great tastes good – I really like anything based on Thematic. It is awesome to see what people can do with it. Anything I suppose.
Very nice Thanks…
Thanks Marti,
Thematic is INCREDIBLE. 2.7 is going to really change the came when it’s released. Can’t wait!
This is gorgeous! It has really worked out for me, its super simple which has been hard to find. I’m actually using it as my portfolio template.
Thanks Jeremy. Glad you like it.
Interesting!
Unfortunately, don’t work in Internet Explorer 6…
This looks fantastic. The only issue I’ve found is it doesn’t seem to support the 2.6 caption code. Any ideas?
Thanks Anizio.
Unfortunately, I won’t be browser proofing any of my free themes for IE6.
Eric, I have noticed the caption code bug. Working on a new version that should fix it. Thanks for checking out Neutica!
Hey Eric,
It looks like the Typogrify Plugin is causing the missing captions issue. To make the captions re-appear you can just de-activate the plugin OR un-check the “Apply SmartyPants to text” option. Not sure why this plugin is causing issues, but i’m sure an update/fix will be available soon.
Thanks for sharing this Allan. A really great theme and it has inspired me to learn a little css and coding in order to get to grips with child themes. I particularly love the floating menu, which i notice is also the header?
I’m totally new to this type of thing but i was wondering if its possible to add a header image/banner above the 2nd and third column. I’ve just learnt how to do this in thematic which seems to have space for a header (and no floating menu), so am wondering if its possible to create a similar header in your template and keep the menu as well?
Hey Marc,
At the moment, this theme isn’t geared for a header image. I’ve taken the header code from the original Thematic design and squeezed it down so it wraps around the header title.
It isn’t impossible though. You may have to dig around in the support forums to get figure it out.
Thanks for checking out Boumatic!
Hi Allan,
This is a truly outstanding theme and I would like to notice you I’m planning to use it on my website. Speaking of which – Thematic is i18n ready making a website easy to translate once and then use different child themes with no more hassle.
However there are few lines in functions.php that prevent the translation. There is an easy way to correct this issue. Change code in:
lines 44 & 49:
<?php printf(__('By %s', 'thematic'), wp_specialchars(get_the_author(), 1)) ?>to
<?php _e('By ', 'thematic'); the_author(); ?>and
line 47:
<?php printf(__('Permalink to %s', 'thematic'), wp_specialchars(get_the_title(), 1)) ?>to
<?php _e('Permalink to ', 'thematic'); the_title(); ?>This will make the translation work correctly, unless there is some other reason for your code that I don’t understand (I’m pretty much of a newbie on the php field).
Anyway, hope this helps and thanks for this great theme once again!
THANKS BART. I will definitely add this to the functions file and update the child theme. I am a NOOB my self on a lot of the PHP coding but I’m picking it up as I go along.
what’s the header font in this?
The headed font is Hoefler Text.
Hi, Allan,
FYI: In IE6, the navigation menu and subscribe, recent posts, new comments, etc. appear below the main content column. Everything is shifted to the left roughly 100px. Footer is below navigation/sidebar. E-mail me and I’ll send you a screenshot.
Thanks,
Jon
Just a question about the licensing – is there any reason you have this licensed under GPL version 3? GPL3 is not compatible with GPL2 which means this child theme cannot be distributed along with Thematic. I’m not even sure it can be used with Wordpress really.
Hi Paul,
To be honest, the GPL is pretty confusing. I figured that GPL3 would be backwards compatible with all of the other versions. I will look into this more and figure out which GPL version fits Boumatic perfectly. Thanks for the incite.
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