Simple Balance 2.1 – Everything is Under Control
One month and 2000 downloads later, the new version of the Simple Balance Free WordPress theme is released.
New options have been added – along with the options of Simple Balance 2.0 – to the theme’s control panel, including:
- Easy to set up featured post (does not use categories);
- Google AdSense alternative for both the top and right sidebar ad space;
- Easy to set up email subscription form; *
- Page selection for the top menu (only selected parent pages will be displayed);
- Two brand new color schemes: Blue Bubble and Curly Green
* Works only with Google’s version of FeedBurner. For other versions, code editing is required.
Upgrading from prior versions
If you’re upgrading from 1.0 or 2.0, all you have to do is to copy the new files over the old ones, overwriting those that already exist (if you haven’t done changes to the theme) and adding the new ones.
Once you’ve uploaded the files, by simply entering the theme’s options panel (Design > Simple Balance 2.1 CP) the new options will automatically be installed.
Everything is under control…
… and now it’s time to OWN you WordPress blog!
Have a look!
See the goodies that await you with Simple Balance 2.1.
Get your copy now for FREE and expect more beautiful updates and color schemes every month!
Special thanks go to Shantanu Goel (@shantanugoel)for providing essential help and feedback, and to Ronald Huereca for writing an excellent guide on WordPress custom queries.
-
- Spread the love!
- Digg
- StumbleUpon
- Delicious
- Fast & Free RSS updates?
- Join the 1,353 subscribers NOW!
More Blogsessive Content
This article has 48 comments
Add a comment
21 blog posts linking to this article
- Simple Balance 2.0 - Free Simple WordPress Theme | Blogging Tips from Blogsessive
- Deviant Art » Blog Archive » Deviant Art Theme : Simple Balance 2.1 - Free Simple WordPress Theme
- Currently on My Desktop 20081101 | Spontaneous Derivation
- Back to Fall: A Changing of Simple Balance Style | Spontaneous Derivation
- WPZOOM ›› 50 Free & Premium Themes you shouldn’t miss
- 13-Three columns free wordpress theme | Bugjee.com
- WordPress 主题 - UBD Moneymaker Theme & Simple Balance - MY-Hou | 不務正業
- 7款精致时尚WordPress主题免费下载 - 菠菜博
- 7个 wordpress 主题 定制 | 付费主题,主题定制,psd to html,wordpress themes - psd2theme
- Blogsessive in December 2008 | Blogging Tips from Blogsessive
- 25 Artistic Themes for WordPress
- Babbling Nonsense » Blog Archive » My 10 Favourite Free Wordpress Themes
- Simple Balance 2.0 - Free Simple WordPress Theme | BlueFox Zone
- 100 The Very Best of Free WordPress Themes « WPCrowd
- 25+ Useful Wordpress Themes with Ads Ready | blueblots.com
- 50 Tane
- 50 Tane Ücretsiz Premium WordPress Teması | Mersin Gündemi | Kent Haberleri | MersinForum.Net
- 100 The Very Best of Free WordPress Themes : FARIFUNCOM
- WordPress Forums » Blog Archive » Free WordPress Themes Sets 50 Premium WordPress Themes
- En yeni +50 Wordpress tema — susuzkuyu
- 100 The Very Best of Free WordPress Themes - WPCrowd
Loading ...
Alex, great new features, especially adsense integration and the new color schemes.
And Thanks for the mention, though I’d say that you are too kind to give me credit for something that you’d have definitely figured out urself, I just probably saved you a couple of minutes, nothing more
This theme is too wonderful to be free
) Great Job 
Shantanu Goel: Community involvement is is essential to any project, and I appreciate it when my community gets involved.
Pavel: Thanks! I figured that instead of releasing 10 free WP themes, better one of higher quality that will get enough updates to “stay alive”.
你的主题很漂亮，我下载使用了。
Admin edit: According to Google, the above text translates as “Your theme is beautiful. I downloaded it.”
Although i downloaded 2.0 just yesterday, i went on to download this as well, before i start doing modifications. Thanks again for the wonderful theme. Adsense integration is a definite plus.
Alex: Thought of letting you know that I have put up the theme onto my blog after a few small modifications and its working really fine and loading superfast as compared to my previous theme.
A couple of suggestions/feature requests:
1. Add a 404 page and an archives page (have added on my own for now, lemme know if u wud like to take a look for reference)
2. Can we have an option to replace the blog’s search with adsense for search?
Thanks
Thanks, suggestions wrote down for the next update.
great job!, i like it.., thx..
this is a high quality theme with so many features, bravo Alex!
Muchas gracias, Manu! You’re very kind.
Alex: I just noticed a very critical problem. With SB 2.1, none of my pages are showing comments (neither existing old ones, nor the form to add new). However comments show up fine on posts. I haven’t checked with 2.0 yet whether the problem was there as well.
Alex: Found the problem. It seems that the page.php is missing a call to comments_template() function. Adding it brings the comments back on the pages.
Shantanu Thanks for the concern, but it no critical error. I deliberately took comments out of pages. If you take a look at Blogsessive’s pages, you’ll notice the same thing, except for the “Contests” page.
I usually no point in people commenting “About”, “Services” or “Contact” pages.
Alex: oh, thanks for the explanation.
I generally keep a lot of pages on my blog for individual projects/softwares I make so keep comments open on them and for the rest I manually select comments and pings closed in wordpress editor.
And sorry for the hurried/critical sounding false-alarm *feeling sheepish*
btw, a small niggle. don’t know if this can be fixed somehow by the theme cuz i’ve found similar issues with many other themes. Sometimes, in the right sidebar a word inside a widget does not “wrap” over to the next line and instead goes slightly out of the sidebar. Now, this works fine in firefox/IE7 but in IE6, the right sidebar drops down below the main content area (yeah a lot of ppl coming to my blog still have IE6 so have to care for it).
Alex, A very nice theme, would like to know, how do we show only excerpts on the HomePage, for all the posts.
Would be really useful.Thanks.
Only a couple caveats I’ve found, which is good for a theme (usually I’m pretty exacting and do know how to wield the PHP and CSS hammers to fix them).
1. Not fully compatible with Theme Test Drive when Simple Balance is in test mode (Simple Balance is fine when not in test mode). The bit in the control panel that lists the style options assumes that get_option(‘template’) always points to the theme directory. Result: Nothing but the default under the style option menu.
Now, this is a specific plugin, but I usually test my sites with it (due to it allowing me to hack to my heart’s content).
2. Difficult to hack in comment numbering via CSS for some reason. I don’t mind, because I have much more control when I tweak the PHP code, but it was odd.
Otherwise… good job! I’m usually able to come up with a list of about 10 shortcomings (or more…) for every theme I’ve run across. You’ve done a very good job here, even better than premium themes some may pay $30, $50, $200 for, in terms of flexibility and orderliness (both in code and in CSS) in the areas that matter the most (and even in some that don’t matter as much, but are second-most in many people’s heads).
Once again… excellent. You’ve left me nearly speechless. After some more tweaks over the next day or so, your theme will be going up on my site.
Shantanu Goel Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll look into it. It should be a simple fix.
—
Avinash Open the “controlpanel.php” file located in the “cp” folder and look for this line of code:
for ($fullPosts = 1; $fullPosts < = $totalPosts; $fullPosts++) {Replace it with this:
for ($fullPosts = 0; $fullPosts < = $totalPosts; $fullPosts++) {Upload the file to your server and then go the the "Simple Balance 2.1 CP" page in the WordPress Administration Panel.
Scroll down to this setting "Always display full posts on home page?" and make sure the checkbox is checked.
Now, the setting below (a select drop down) should include also a "0 out of X) option.
Select it and update. That's it.
Oh, and if you're displaying featured posts, you also have to edit the "featuredpost.php" file and replace this line:
the_content('Continue reading '.get_the_title('', '', false));With this one:
Hope this helps.
Unfortunatelly my comment template can't handle long lines of code but you can still copy those lines if you hold down SHIFT, select the first character, and with SHIFT pressed continuously you hit the END button (above the arrow keys usually). This will select the whole line and you can copy and paste it in a new file with CTRL+C followed by CTRL+V.
---
Arachne Jericho Thanks for your kind words of appreciation and also for what you've wrote in John Scalzi's blog.
I really appreciate it.
One more thank you, for the feedback. I'll install the "Test Drive" plugin on my test server and see what can be done to resolve the situation. Feedback is always helpful as this theme was developed and is updated in the spare time (mostly late at night) between publishing on Blogsessive and taking care of the projects of my design studio.
Now, the comment numbering is done based on a plugin: Ping/Track/Comment Count. The plugin info and script have been included in "functions.php". For usage info you can check out the author's website here
The idea is that comments have been separated from trackbacks and ping, and the counter only displays the number of actual comments, not including trackbacks.
Alex,
Enjoying messing around with your code.
For the comments numbering, I didn’t mean the count of the comments vs trackbacks, but numbers for the comments. First comment has a “#1″ somewhere, second has a “#2″, etc. I’m pretty sure CSS doesn’t yet have the power to count comments, but it does have ordered lists.
It’s a useful feature for a site that has large amounts of discussion (that would be John Scalzi’s Whatever, not my tiny blog), so that people can reply to specific comments above by using the number as a reference.
Even when I switch out the commentList ul for an ol and use list-style-type: decimal and remove all overrides I could see in the relevant CSS files, it won’t number the comments.
So I just have a counter in the PHP code and then insert the number wherever I like (in my case, as part of the commentmetadata div). Works better that way anyways.
Ah, there is one more thing. You need a separate 404.php because otherwise invalid URLs just return the front page.
Alex,
Great Wordpress theme!
Good job!
Respect!
i wanna try to apllied this great theme for my blog, thx a lot
Hey Alex, am facing a small issue. The topad doesn’t show up on the home page but does in every other page of the blog. I checked index.php and topads.php is included there. Not sure whats the issue. Any insights?
Hey, dont worry about that. Seems that it was some proxy server serving me cached pages and not a problem with the theme.
I’m using your theme on one of my blogs and I must say that it is really good! I’ve come across a problem though. I configured feeds on Feedburner and activated Email Subscriptions and then entered the details as you’ve done in the above screenshot. Everytime I try subscribing, I get the following error – “The feed does not have subscriptions by email enabled”. Is there something I can do to get rid of this problem?
Narayanan Hariharan, in order to see what the problem is can you answer 2 questions?
1. Are you using the old Feedburner code (the one from feedburner.com) or the new, migrated to Google (feedburner.google.com)?
2. Is the theme live somewhere with the settings you mentioned? I’d need to take a look at the source code of the page, the output of the form.
@Narayana: I think that is a feedburner problem. I faced that issue as well, but when I tried again it worked. When I checked in my feedmedic report it was showing some timeout errors for my feed during that period of time..
Shantanu, we solved the problem via email. It was just a bad copy-paste.
@Alex: Ohk..BTW when r u bringing out 2.2..mez waiting for it restlessly
(btw i integrated adsense for search on the top right search box and on 404 pages in 2.1. let me know if u have not added them yet to 2.2, can send u the code to save u a few minutes)
Can this be used with Wordpress.com hosted blog ?
If yes, how ?
Thanks for such a great and useful theme. I have already used it on two of my blogs and I really enjoy working with it, since it’s so easy!
Hi Alex,
I just fell in love with your theme and want to use it as a base for my upcoming website for high school science students. i noticed that you have a “current page” navigation marker and in the demo, clicking the About link results in a small bar above “About”. Somehow this is not working for the theme i downloaded? I don’t completely understand wordpress scripts yet and cannot troubleshoot it myself! do let me know if you could fix this or if there is something i could switch on or off…
THanks again for the great work!
This is the best tool I have ever seen before but I think it needs some features,
you should think about that,
you may add different banner size option, as you know there are different sizes,
it will make your tool more popular not just for blogger even for companies.
Great theme. Two things I wish I could do:
1) use Sideblog plugin.
2) use only widgets for sidebar content.
Thanks,
Kevin
Nice theme!
How about flash banners ?
Hey,
GREAT Theme! I’ve tweaked it myself, but do you have any plans to incorporate the Facebook Connect plug-ins?
Thanks for your hard work!
I would like to know if Simple Balance 2.1 work with wordpress 2.7 (i.e. commentary)
Alex,
Great theme, love the options and easy tweaking.
I can’t seem to find the answer to this one – the link to older posts …/page/2 doesn’t work on my site. Just me?
Hi Alex, thanks for an excellence work. At 41 years old, this is exactly what I am looking for.
Just one thing.. the gravatar seem to be not working. Any idea on how to fix this?
Cheers.. Happy New Year!
Michael I’m pretty sure that the pagination problem does not reside with the theme. I think there’s a problem with a script somewhere that continuously delays the page loading until the browser seems to give up. maybe a plugin or something?
Uchu Keling I see you managed to solve the Gravatar problem. Good job!
thank you. good theme
Love the theme.. I was wondering, how do you get it to not truncate the previous posts.. I’d like for it to show the picture on the article, pictures are essential to my blog.. hope you can help
nice theme. I am editing a little with this template now…
I really like the theme – good job.
On previewing before activating it I found I’d lost everything in my left sidebar so had to copy it all into my right sidebar – but not a problem as long as I don’t lose anything – can change the order later.
One quick question though before I this it on my site: Does this theme support child pages?
If not, can you tell me how to add advertising to my current WP theme (Disciple) please? Is there a plugin?
I was looking a nice theme for my blog and i found this theme. this is a beautiful theme. thanks, i downloaded
is beutiful theme
Nice theme!
How about flash banners ?
Magnífico!! Gracias!! Thank you!!
Saludos.
Great theme! I have a problem, though. I would like to look at it in the other color schemes however the only one that shows up in the theme’s control panel is the default red & aqua. How do I get the other color schemes to show up in the drop down so I can take a look to make a selection? I have all the .css files uploaded and kept the original folder structure.
Thanks!