Boumatic

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.

42 Comments

  1. Cristi
    Posted Oct 31, 2008 at 1:46 pm | Permalink

    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!

  2. Allan
    Posted Oct 31, 2008 at 2:11 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Cristi!
    Yeah 2.7 is definitely going to change the game. I believe It’s coming sometime in Nov. Can’t wait!

  3. Ian Stewart
    Posted Oct 31, 2008 at 3:11 pm | Permalink

    Allan, Boumatic is ridiculously beautiful. Great job. I love it.

  4. Allan
    Posted Oct 31, 2008 at 3:30 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Ian. Couldn’t have done it without ya! ;-)

  5. marti garaughty
    Posted Nov 3, 2008 at 5:28 pm | Permalink

    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!

  6. Allan
    Posted Nov 4, 2008 at 10:06 am | Permalink

    Thanks Marti. Wp 2.7 is going to change the game. The beta version out now is incredible!

  7. craig
    Posted Nov 19, 2008 at 6:57 pm | Permalink

    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…

  8. Allan
    Posted Nov 24, 2008 at 1:56 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Marti,
    Thematic is INCREDIBLE. 2.7 is going to really change the came when it’s released. Can’t wait!

  9. dropsever
    Posted Nov 29, 2008 at 9:00 pm | Permalink

    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.

  10. Allan
    Posted Dec 2, 2008 at 2:21 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Jeremy. Glad you like it.

  11. Anizio Silva
    Posted Dec 5, 2008 at 10:23 pm | Permalink

    Interesting!

    Unfortunately, don’t work in Internet Explorer 6…

  12. Eric
    Posted Dec 6, 2008 at 10:16 am | Permalink

    This looks fantastic. The only issue I’ve found is it doesn’t seem to support the 2.6 caption code. Any ideas?

  13. Allan
    Posted Dec 8, 2008 at 3:22 pm | Permalink

    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!

  14. Allan
    Posted Dec 10, 2008 at 2:25 pm | Permalink

    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.

  15. Marc Reck
    Posted Dec 15, 2008 at 4:57 pm | Permalink

    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?

    • Allan
      Posted Dec 16, 2008 at 12:24 pm | Permalink

      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!

  16. Bart Oleksiak
    Posted Jan 5, 2009 at 9:14 pm | Permalink

    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!

    • Allan
      Posted Jan 11, 2009 at 12:06 pm | Permalink

      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.

  17. sabrina
    Posted Mar 5, 2009 at 3:25 pm | Permalink

    what’s the header font in this?

    • Allan
      Posted Mar 11, 2009 at 11:59 am | Permalink

      The headed font is Hoefler Text.

  18. Jon Bourne
    Posted Mar 14, 2009 at 1:00 pm | Permalink

    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

    • Ramon
      Posted Nov 9, 2009 at 6:34 pm | Permalink

      I’ve got the same problem, but with the new Firefox. And only in my wordpress installation.. the Demopage by allan works fine.

      Why?

  19. Paul
    Posted Apr 18, 2009 at 3:45 am | Permalink

    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.

    • Allan
      Posted Apr 19, 2009 at 4:43 pm | Permalink

      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.

  20. Adsenser
    Posted Jul 9, 2009 at 9:57 am | Permalink

    This looks great!
    Thanks alot for sharing this theme. How can use it without Thematic?

    • Allan
      Posted Jul 14, 2009 at 10:46 am | Permalink

      It will not work without Thematic.

  21. Jake Skedgell
    Posted Aug 6, 2009 at 8:16 am | Permalink

    Hi Allan,

    The download seems to be broken.

    Thanks.

    • Allan
      Posted Aug 10, 2009 at 2:27 pm | Permalink

      Hi Jake, The download link is now fixed.

  22. Kim
    Posted Aug 7, 2009 at 2:26 am | Permalink

    The download link isn’t working for me.

    • Allan
      Posted Aug 10, 2009 at 1:37 pm | Permalink

      Woops. The download links are corrected now.

      • Oliver Allen
        Posted Feb 4, 2010 at 12:34 am | Permalink

        Hey,

        Download link seems to direct to your presentation instead of the theme?

        Also, would you foresee me (a noob) having any difficulty if I attempt to redesign the homepage to look a bit more like AutoFocus (DIG the photo layout) using just CSS?

        Thanks!

  23. Gregory Rossi
    Posted Aug 19, 2009 at 3:50 pm | Permalink

    I’m a newbie to all of this but up for the challenge of learning (now that you and WP make it seem easy)

    Can I set a custom background image for each of the three columns?

    • Allan
      Posted Aug 22, 2009 at 12:43 pm | Permalink

      Hey Gregory,
      Yup, you’ll have to play with the CSS a bit.

  24. Chris
    Posted Sep 23, 2009 at 5:07 pm | Permalink

    Hi Allan,

    thanks for sharing the elegant Boumatic child theme ! I am pretty new to wordpress and am currently experimenting with different themes.

    I have tried to select Boumatic from my admin interface but it doesn’t appear although I’ve uploaded it to my theme directory…thematic is installed and is working. I get an error message saying that there is a damaged theme ( obviously boumatic) missing a style sheet. I’d be very happy if you could help me out ! Thanks in advance !

    • Allan
      Posted Oct 11, 2009 at 1:21 pm | Permalink

      Hi Chris,
      Make sure that all of the files are in the boumatic folder. Mainly the style.css file.

  25. David D
    Posted Oct 3, 2009 at 12:12 pm | Permalink

    Great theme, very clean and minimal, gorgeous use of typography. But I find the way the hovers are used a bit counterintuitive. Dare I ask if there’s an alternative CSS for that? *ducks* ;-)

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