For many New Zealanders the Coromandel Peninsula, with its perfect beaches and beautiful scenery, is synonymous with summer and relaxation. This friendly, uncluttered theme for your WordPress blog captures some of the magic of this special place.

Supported WordPress features

• Core features of WordPress 2.5 – 2.8
• Theme options page (requires WP 2.7+)
• Bundled WP 2.5+ widgets
• Threaded comments up to 3 levels deep (requires WP 2.7+)
• Paginated comments (requires WP 2.7+)
• Sticky posts (requires WP 2.7+)
• Gravatars

You can easily customise the colours and header image of Coromandel

Theme-specific features

• Widgetised side column and three footer columns
• Bundled WordPress widgets styled to match theme
• Fully customisable colour scheme
• Bespoke archive, recent posts and recent comments listings
• Distinct admin comments
• Post counts in tag clouds
• Comment counts in recent posts and recent comments
• Dates with previous and next post links
• ‘Time ago’ style post dates
• Bespoke bullets and icons
• Baseline grid (12 pixels with 3 pixel subdivisions)
• Internet Explorer 7+ CSS

Third-party plug-in support

• ShareThis

Licence

The Coromandel theme is released under a GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. From what I understand, you’re entitled to use the Coromandel theme for any purpose, distribute it, make whatever changes you like to it and distribute those too!

Caveats

Coromandel is my first theme for WordPress. I have taken considerable time and care to develop it, and would appreciate your understanding if you are dissatisfied with it.

I have made design decisions around the appearance or otherwise of certain elements. Many, such as the uniform text size in tag clouds, are integral to the theme and won’t change. However, I am no developer, and there are also a few technical caveats you should know before you use it.

• To support custom colour schemes, the bullet and icon images in this theme use the png format. which allows them to be overlaid over any colour. However this image format is not supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and may not display correctly under that browser.
• Coromandel displays all top-level pages at the top under your blog name. If you have numerous or lengthy top-level pages, these will run onto two or more lines unless you shorten or group them under fewer top-level pages.
• If you run a technical blog and make extensive use of the preformatted text format, this theme may not be for you unless you are prepared to insert linebreaks. Its limited width means that long lines of  preformatted text will knock the side column down beneath the main column.
• The theme makes several queries to the database in addition to those made by the default WordPress themes. Coromandel-themed pages therefore take marginally longer to load than those with the default themes. They will also increase server load slightly and may be unsuitable for sites with high traffic.

Future development

Circumstances permitting, I’ll do my best to fix any issues that arise with new WordPress releases within a few days. If these releases contain new features, I’ll put notification on my blog as to whether I’ll be implementing them, which will probably be the case, and it will take a few weeks before an update is ready.

Acknowledgements

• Developed from the default WordPress theme Kubrick by Michael Heilemann
• Header image Inside Cathedral Cove by Horst Puschmann
• Recent posts / most commented posts developed from Most Commented plugin by Nick Momrik
• Archive listings developed from Kottke Style Archives plugin by Al Lattimore
• Built on WordPress. Thanks for all your hard work, folks!

Download

• If accepted for inclusion into the WordPress theme directory, Coromandel will be available for download here in the next day or so.