Neutica is a lightweight, two (five?) column, widgetized, Wordpress theme designed completely with CSS, sans image graphics. The design is based on the sometimes overly popular yet classic font: Helvetica Neue. Neutica is ideal for mini-magazine publishing or standard blog publishing. This was built with Sandbox — a valid XHTML / CSS selector rich Wordpress environment. Neutica was developed for WordPress 2.5+, but it should also work in 2.3.+. It has been tested mostly in Safari and Firefox but it should also maintain its look in IE 6 and IE 7 outside of a few font discrepancies.
Demo
Check out a live demo of Neutica here.
Screenshots
Check out a few screenshots.
Download
PLEASE READ THIS before you download Neutica: This theme does not cost you a dime. All I ask is that you please keep a link back to allancole.com/wordpress as it requires in the license below. Also, if you have questions about Wordpress please visit the WordPress Documentation or Support Forums. If you find bugs, I will try my best to help you with them. Just leave a comment below or email me. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to help you customize this theme but I am open to suggestions for features that you may want to see in future updates.
Download Neutica Theme 1.0.9
Updated to version 1.0.9 which fixes the colors.php CSS issue.
I will be updating this theme from time to time so subscribe to the feed to stay up to date.
Features
- The Neutica theme admin has options to alter the default colors of this theme.
- This theme was built entirely with CSS which mean there are no heavy theme images to slow down your site.
- For users who have the full version of the font: Helvetica Neue installed and activated on their machines, the headers and sub headers will display in HEAVY, BLACK and LIGHT weights, giving the theme an even cleaner look.
- I have tweaked the original Sandbox theme to suit the needs of this design, however much of the power of sandbox is left in tact. Follow this link to find out more.
Installation
To install, open the Neutica Theme folder and upload the contents of the plugins folder to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory. Upload the neutica folder to your wordpress/wp-content/themes folder. Then open your Wordpress Admin, activate the plugins under the Plugins tab, and select the Neutica theme under the Design tab (or Presentation tab in versions prior to Wordpress 2.5).
Modifications
There is only a few minor and optional changes that you can make to this theme.
- Featured Posts – This theme requires a category called Feature to operate correctly. The theme will then pull the latest post in that category and load it into the Feature section of the homepage.
- Post Images – Almost all of the images in this theme are loaded automaticaly. There are no Custom Field Keys/Values to worry about. Neutica will automatically grab the latest uploaded image attachment and use its thumbnail for the archive and home pages. Same goes for the Feature posts except it grabs the full resolution image for the background. Just make sure that you go to SETTINGS > MISCELLANEOUS and set the thumbnail size to 185px x 185px. That’s it.
- Tabbed Sidebar – The content in the Tabbed sidebar can be changed to whatever you like. In later versions, i will try to widgetize the tabs themselves, but for now it has to be done manually by editting the sidebar.php. The Tabbed content has its own widget section called “Tabbed Sidebar”. To get rid of the Tabbed Sidebar, just add a widget to it and it will replace the tabs.
Plugins
Neutica uses 1 simple plugin, which is included in the download. It is highly recommended, but not necessarily required.
- WP-Typogrify (included) — Helps to make web type conform to printed type standards.
Future Versions
The one update I plan on doing will implement a better way to manage the Tabbed Area so that you don’t have to dig into the code. As usual I am always open to suggestions or help with improvements. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section.
License
Neutica is Copyright © 2008 by Allan Cole. It is released 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. I only ask that you please give credit where credit is due by providing a link back to my site: http://www.allancole.com/wordpress.
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.





318 Comments
Neutica Theme – How do I delete the default widgets that are there: Pages, Categories, Search, etc… I want to put my own widgets into the sidebar… help. Thank you.
Hi Robert,
That’s easy.
Hi Allan, I’m doing a project using wordpress for my web design class. i love your theme, so i’m working with neutica. I’m really new in css and coding and i’m experiencing multiple difficulties (and my project is due monday!!). i have one big question. my content is not left align and i don’t know how to do it. on the other hand, the menu bar is at the bottom left, creating a huge white space on top of the menu bar.
thanks for everything, your theme is great
j
Florradikal,
Try disabling some of your plugins. Looks like they are conflicting with Neutica somehow.
Hi Allan,
Love your theme! It looks like print!
I installed the Flickr Photo Album plugin by Joe Tan, but it doesn’t seem to be compatible with Neutica. Do you know any possible reasons why? Is it something I can fix on my own?
Thanks!
Hey it’s me again.
Actually, it seems that it’s not the plugin’s problem, cuz when I inserted the gallery from media (rather than using the Flickr tool), there will be something like: [gallery link="file"] …. showing up in the entry on the Home page. But when I click into individual post, those code won’t appear.
Hi Annie,
Working on a fix for this.
I have only nextgen plugin, but i added after yesterday and my problem it’s there since i added the image to the header. Is it the image too big? My classmate she is using your theme too and she had the same problem.
thanks again
According to other users the Nextgen plugin doesn’t work well with this theme. However, your site looks fine on my machine.
Hi Allan, Love you’re work.
Just a quick question on the homepage layout. Is there a quick way to switch the image and post title placements that the post title is on the left side no the right.
Cheers dude – keep up the awesome work.
Chris Jones
Hi there, love the theme, but I’m having some troubles,
if the image is too large it is overlapped by the text to the right,
also the thumbnails on the homepage are quite pixelated
ooh, one other thing, I changed the background colour to white, but when pages load they flash yellow for a split second
thanks :)
don’t worry about the images, theyre fine now.
but the page does flash yellow each time a page is loaded.
If there’s a way to solve this, it would be awesome.
great theme :)
Jami
Thanks James,
You should try resizing your images using this method.
Make sure you change the thumbnail image sizes as it states in the Instructions. That will fix the pixelation.
The color switch flicker you’re is experiencing is more than likely caused by the PHP version running on your server. I am looking for a fix for this. There is an update on the way that should fix this.
brilliant thanks!
look forward to the update :)
Hey, I just want to say thank your for this terrific theme. We just launched our hobby site about Japanese curry using this theme. It’s so clean and very flexible in terms of customizing. Thanks so much!
Thanks Karen!
I’ve chosen to use your template to practice using WP. I would like to turn off the RSS link from the main navigation. How would I do that? Thanks.
A great and easy to use template for certain!!!
Hi, alan,
first of all, amazing, brilliant and real beautiful neutica-theme you made! :) thanks alot for this!
but i have a question regarding the “1 pixel out audio player” you surely know. if i use it in an article to post an mp3, everything works fine and as it should be. but if i click to the article overview (main site), i doesn´t appear as player in the article-preview, it appears as the written html-code … is there a way to fix this problem?
thanks for your help!
all the best,
steve
Thanks Steve,
The quick fix is to use regular mp3 links, and have the “1 pixel out audio player” automatically replace the links.
Hi Allan,
First of all, love the theme, absolutely ravishing!
But… I’m struggling with a few things:
- Is it possible to remove or at least rename the ‘home’ button in the sidebar navigation?
- is there a mediaplayer you would advise? I noticed wordtube causes the theme to do some weird things (on the blog-page, text won’t show, only the tumb…)
Thanks a million for your efforts!
d
Hi Dieter,
You can change the home link in th homp.php file.
Most standard embeddable players should work fine on the single pages.
Hi every night i spend my time travelling on design websites, ( im studying that) so i arrived here looking WP Themes, and i found that waht im looking for since so much time NEUETICA, let me tell you its GREAT!!!!!! im new on css and wp, so i only wanna know how to 2 cloumns after recent coments ( looks like yoou demo page) because it looks like this in “my demo” blog preview.
so much thnks!! from Argentina Allan!!
get a hunk from bueno aires!!
Ezequiel
I was curious: How do you center the theme on the page? I know it must be easy, but I can’t seem to figure it out. Sorry for the bother!
Thanks!
Love the theme.
Thanks fos this excellent theme!! i´ve been looking for something like that for a long time and here it is…..
i have only 1 trouble, when i want to paste a post link on Facebook Wall, only appears the Post Title with the link, but the Photo and te first lines of the post, dont.
I saw anothers wordpress blogs, and i copy one like of them, and when i paste it in facebook, appears the pics, the post title, and some lines of text of the post.
Can you help me with that?? ill be gratefully with you
sorry but my english isnt perfect
THANKS AGAIN FOR THE THEME!!
Ezequiel Jurado from Argentina
Hi Ezequiel,
I don’t how Facebook handles the feed/link creation.
I’m not sure how I could solve this issue.
Hey Allan,
I just wanted to say thanks. This is a super simple, flexible, and extendible theme. It’s really easy for a know-nothing like me to use. I’m planning to use it for a couple little projects. Your site designs look great, too.
Thanks,
Doug
Thanks Doug!
Hey Allan,
I am very impressed with your theme! I have been eyeing it up for the past few months and have finally decided to take a dive and update my blog’s look.
How can I get the text on my homepage posts to wrap to the right side of the thumbnails. I thought the theme would do this automatically, but I can’t seem to keep the text from only displaying at the bottom of each thumbnail.
Thanks!
Nevermind, I fixed the problem, it was a plugin I had activated. Thanks!
1st) coolest theme in the world!
2nd) can you help me removing the shortcode from the excerpts?
Hi Ramin,
That fix is coming in the next version along with IE support.
just wondering if there was a way to make the thumbnails show up for all the posts on the main page. I went to settings/misc. but there is no option for thumbnail size. It displays them for some posts but not all.
!!!! In order for the thumbnails to show up in the main page they have to be uploaded through wordpress. They don’t show up if their linked from an external site like Flickr. :D
I have used your template. So far so good when I view it in Safari or Firefox (MAC and PC). But it doesn’t work in IE for the PC. I can’t put my finger on what the problem would be since it works well in every browser but IE. Any ideas?
Hi again Allan, i´ve a question.
I started to “touch” the theme, and i tried to put a .png with alfa on the background of the menu pages, but, the png file, doenst looks like original with alfa, ni this case, looks like grey without transparency, the same with a gif file.
Do you know why that with a common png file, who must looks with his own transparency??
Sorry but my english is not perfect.
I hope you understand my questions.
The best from Argentina!!!
Ezequiel
Hi Allen,
First of all, I am really enjoying Neutica, thanks!
I’ve been playing around with the CSS and layout all day, and I just realized that the footer information you originally had disappeared, and has been replaced by standard WordPress one.
How do I revert back to your footer?
Thanks,
Jacob
Figured it out… the footer.php file got moved to a few different location.
Thanks!
Hi! Allan. I love this theme :)
I changed some old functions.
Do you think that this is correct?
Look, wp-config.php(’WP_DEBUG’, true)
1: get_author_link
get_author_posts_url
ex.)/neutica/home.php, single.php…etc
2: get_settings
get_option
ex.)/neutica/functions.php
3: comments_rss
get_post_comments_feed_link
ex.)/neutica/single.php
I only simply replaced it because I did not understand PHP.
However, when re-Release is done after you correct it, it is glad.
English is wrong because I’m Japanese, sorry.
wicked theme, allan! can you point me in a code where do i make it flexible width? it’s really a nice theme for blogging but i find it extremely cool with photoblogs. if only i could move the rightside stuff to the edge of the screen
Thanks Nick,
You’ll have to play around with the CSS a little bit to get a fixed width. Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out though.
Hello,
I must say, I really appreciated your theme. I was searching for a blogspot theme and when I come up with your theme, I decided to buy my domain with mysql and set up my own place.
And I did, I really appreciate it though I have a problem, most probably because I am new on wordpress. Whenever I upload a photo from my computer, i just don’t see it. I tried to play with the upload folder, then it turned out to be even worse with failures and warnings. What might be the problem, because I really want to use featured articles images to show up on the mainpage.
It would be great if you can help me, thanks for the amazing work!
sorry for too many troubles but, i am having this problem right now…
‘The uploaded file could not be moved to /var/www/vhosts/djitrois.com/httpdocs/wordpress/wp-content/uploads.’
Ok. Yeah that has to have something to do with your installation. Here’s some solutions.
Hi Djem,
If you’re getting errors it could have something to do with how you set it up. Neutica is pretty non-intrusive theme, so as long as you have the latest version of WordPress you should be ok. This post seems to be working ok though.
9 Trackbacks
[...] vieler Spielerei setze ich nun das Neutica Theme von Allan Cole ein. Warum, wieso, [...]
[...] the theme, i chose neutica, designed by allan cole and based on sandbox. it’s flexible, easily configurable, and [...]
[...] that’s my reasoning for starting over with Wordpress. The current theme that I am using is called Neutica by Allan Cole. It’s a typographic theme focusing on white space or in this case yellow space and [...]
[...] Release Page [...]
[...] next theme I tried (currently in use as of this posting) was Allan Cole’s Neutica, also a simple, typograph-driven design. After some tweaking to suit my needs, I was fairly happy [...]
[...] Anleitung, Download und Website des Themes | Demo-Website [...]
[...] here is a new design for Automotif, a Sandbox Wordpress theme, slightly altered, called NEUTICA by Allan Cole. [...]
[...] So I decided to go for a very simple and sober new theme in order to ensure a good user experience on eNik based on a heavily tweaked neutica theme. [...]
[...] Neutica is a simple and clean Wordpress theme based around Sandbox. It celebrates the much-used and oft-oversued Helvetica Neue type aesthetic. Check it out. [...]