Agregado is a WordPress theme by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson, commissioned by the folks at Smashing Magazine. It features a built-in lifestream module and contact form with custom control panel options.
The motivation was to preserve the personal website, aggregate your data from sources around the web like Flickr, Delicious and Twitter, and publish it all in one convenient place in a consistent format. More details & documentation»
Live Demo
Download the Theme
Download the PSD
Requirements
- WordPress 2.6+
- Tested in: Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, IE7+
- Host server with PHP5+ and cURL installed
Support and Discussion
After 50,000+ downloads, Agregado has an active forum community that largely supports itself when I cannot help.
If you are using Agregado for a project and have emergency questions, I strongly recommend using one of the Experts over at WPQuestions.com, a problem-solving community for WordPress.
Features
- Lifestream module with carousel
- Animated dropdown menus
- Custom archives page
- Built-in contact form module with AJAX sent/fail message
- Built-in drop caps for paragraphs
- Numerical pagination on archive and search pages
- Author-highlighting for comments
- User profile module
- Widgetized bottom bar on homepage
- Widgetized sidebar on single post pages
- ‘More in this Category’ sidebar module
- Control panel options for lifestream and contact form
Getting things configured
- Go to Settings->Permalinks and ensure your URLs use names, so the “Archives” icon links correctly
- Go to Write->Page, and create a new page called Archives, selecting “archives” from the Template pulldown menu.
- Go to Design->Agregado Options and input your RSS information from services you want featured in your lifestream, such as Flickr, Delicious or Twitter.
- Go to Design->Agregado Options and input your email address and success message for the contact form
- Go to Users->Your Profile and fill out the First Name, Last Name and Biographical Info fields.
Frequently Asked Questions
- I installed Agregado – why isn’t WP finding my stylesheets and javascript? Why are subpage menus not working on certain pages?
Check to make sure none of your plugins are colliding with any of the theme’s jQuery. Starting by turning them all off. If you find specific collisions, please email me. - Why does the lifestream load slowly sometimes?
Sometimes fetching certain feeds (ex: Twitter) takes a second longer. Also make sure permissions are set to 0777 on the /includes/ and /includes/cache/ folders, though this should happen automatically upon install.In the control panel options, you can also set the intervals feeds are retrieved (ex: 60 minutes).
I would also recommend Donncha’s awesome WP Super Cache plugin to speed things up.
- Why doesn’t my link to the Archives page work?
Make sure you have created a new Page called “Archives” and selected your custom template from the pulldown. - How does the user profile pic work?
If you haven’t already, visit Gravatar and sign up for an account using the same email address as your WordPress admin account.
Big Thanks…
…to Chris Coyier, Ben Gillbanks, Ian Stewart and Hafiz Rahman for beta testing.
Changelog
• Version 1.2 | Sep 10, 2008
• Version 1.1 | Sep 9, 2008
• Version 1.0 | Sep 8, 2008
Follow me on Twitter
11:08 am
nice theme, thx
11:14 am
Gorgeous work, I love how it looks and works without getting too crowded.
11:45 am
Really nice work. A very nice looking and working Interface. Is it possible to use it with a childtheme very well?
Greets from Germany,
marcus
11:58 am
Wow. Very nice work, guys. Thanks for giving it away – this blows most premium themes out of the water!
12:02 pm
Looks fantastic Darren. Nice one.
12:30 pm
Are you _kidding_ me? This is wickedly or insanely nice.
One question that probably deserves more investigation on my part, but I assume folks who use this would want to link the “Browse Pages” and “Search” items to actual links in case javascript is turned off? Before I started using a text-based browser, I dinna care; but I use one nearly daily and it’s frustrating to try to use sites reliant on javascript.
Not a criticism, just a question/clarification for my own edification.
12:35 pm
That’s beautiful. And free? Are you nuts?
12:41 pm
Great Theme! I will test it.
1:06 pm
Really impressive. The attention to detail on this theme is amazing. So many things to love about it: the drop downs, the pagination, and archive page are my favs.
1:09 pm
you guys are amazing! who needs sweetcron ;)
1:16 pm
Beautiful work guys. I’m really impressed.
1:58 pm
Congrats !
2:34 pm
Thanks to all! We’re thrilled by the feedback so far.
@Chris: We fixed a few permissions in the zip file just now, but I’m not sure that would affect it. Anyone else getting that error?
2:58 pm
What is the code that disables something that’s embedded (i.e. a youtube video) into a post on the main page? Even if it’s just for the featured/most recent post.
3:32 pm
Congratulations, incredible theme.
4:02 pm
I think that’s related to the permissions change we made a little while ago. Try downloading once more.
Unfortunately Twitter is one of the least reliable feeds.
5:34 pm
Really great, thanks very much!
8:04 pm
Working on the jQuery calls right now, to make sure they don’t collide with plugins like Lightbox. Will post an update soon.
8:09 pm
Nice theme, thank you.
9:17 pm
Its beautiful! :)
10:24 pm
Javascript issues should be fine now, just tested with Lightbox, plus a few more little tweaks. Anyone having trouble, go ahead and download again.
10:32 pm
Much Thanks….
10:44 pm
It’s a great theme. Will make sure to feature this on Happyblog Design! :)
5:26 am
Great theme, as always!
5:46 am
Hi Darren,
Oh Boy! Congrats to you both with another fine theme. You make it very difficult for me not to replace my Mimbo Pro custom with this beauty! I’m very tempted.
Great work you guys!
Cheers,
Patrick
6:04 am
Tested it in IE6, works fine there too!
Good job man!
6:37 am
Any chance of the PSD files? would make life so perfect :-)
9:53 am
Check your permalink (just under the post title) and make sure it points to ‘http://brandonhays.com/blog/archives’.
Are you sure it’s not just slow to load? Have you tried turning plugins off one by one to see if there are any collisions?
I just uploaded a ‘newyorktimes.gif’ image to my images folder, input the RSS feed and it worked fine.
9:57 am
There aren’t any plugins except Askimet, it’s a fresh install of Wordpress on that host. Also, the find me elsewhere is shown white on IE 7 and Firefox 3 on two internet connections so that’s not the problem.
9:58 am
The link to the image showing the problem is here http://img221.imageshack.us/my.php?image=imagens5.jpg (this one is with not feeds entered).
10:00 am
It’s always going to be white if there are no feeds entered.
Can you email me a user account and I can take a look?
11:26 am
GORGEOUS theme. Great work! :D
My only comment: the theme is especially great for folks who don’t have a lot of categories, since they’re listed at top. I have a ton of categories, and they’re not looking quite so nice at the top. :( It looks like they’re throwing off the header.
I do know CSS, and will probably hack it a little to get my categories down at the bottom of the page. :)
12:47 pm
@`o-o` I have the latest version running, with Lightbox 2 and I got no issues whatsoever. Maybe you need to check out the permissions of the JS folder, and each of the Javascript files in there. Should be executable.
Only issue I have left now is that my feed doesn’t grab any info from other sites, apart from Flickr. I got Delicious set up, as well as a custom RSS feed. But none of them are appearing. Anyone have a clue what I missed? Thanks!
5:26 pm
Interesting theme. I’ve been aggressively in the “outsource everything” camp for the past couple of years now, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that blog posts can accomplish things and convey ideas that tweets, flickr photos, delicious bookmarks, etc. can’t do on their own.
so I was looking for examples of designs that give equal weight to both blog posts with feed activity and this appears to do a good job highlighting the two sides. great job!
9:25 pm
I love this theme–it’s so functional, and so thoughtfully, thoroughly, and artfully designed–so thank you!
I’m in the process of hacking it to suit the needs of a site i’m working on, but so far it’s all aesthetic and nothing much functional. That said, I have removed lifestream from the index page sidebar for now. I disabled all the plugins but the More in ‘Category’ feature isn’t working. Any ideas?
10:10 am
Very superB theme. Not using wordpress, but this is really excellent balance of simplicity and good look ! 4.5/5
12:58 pm
For the various feeds issues, version 1.2 has been released.
@adrian: I think the problem is that your blog is on a subdomain of your site. You might just want to copy the permalink from your post-edit page, open up header.php and index.php, and paste it within the link to the archives button.
3:00 pm
@Darren sorry, but how would I do that?
7:52 pm
Great job. Wonderful theme. Thanks..
9:25 pm
You’ll need to visit gravatar.com and sign up, using the same email address you use for WordPress.
10:46 pm
The custom archives page is astonishing.
Why not release it as a Wordpress plugin?
12:21 am
Damn Darren….that’s some serious niceness you and Matt put together. Been awhile…I’ve been stupid busy…but had to give you your props on this. Hope all is well!
11:06 am
Hey and thank you for a magnificent theme.
After upgrading to the latest version today (1.2) I still have one lingering error code since the first install:
PHP Notice: XML error: Invalid document end at line 1, column 1 in …\wp-content\themes\agregado\includes\simplepie.inc on line 1783
Any clues as to what is causing this?
12:12 pm
Since updating to v1.2 (I think? – I don’t recall noticing it with v1.1) the scrolling sidebar no longer works. I tried uploading a new version of the v1.2 theme and still nothing. The demo on your site works fine for me. Any thoughts?
Still an amazing theme. I hope all our Q’s aren’t frustrating you too much so that you never do a theme release like this again! :)
1:05 pm
@mahina: that’s either caused by non-supported characters in the feed URL (? marks or other symbols) or by a feed filled with errors. What additional feeds are you using?
@chris: seems to work fine for me (Win/FF3).
1:15 pm
Yeah – I just tested in Mac/FF3 and it works. Seems I’ve got issues with Mac/SF 3.1.2. Good to know. Weird that the demo page works fine but mine doesn’t – though it did before. Have to think back to what else I might have changed.
How difficult would it be to add an asides category call to the sidebar? I see that the lifestream call is a PHP request so I suspect not easily duplicated (at least for someone of my WP Ninjaing ability) so if it’s beyond the scope of what a free WP theme offers, no worries.
I’m so used to having the last 4-5 entries in full on the main page that it’s a bit of a shift for me to only have 1 ‘featured’ article.
3:55 pm
Hmm, I can’t say I’ve had problems with Pownce, it’s pulling fine in the demo. I’ll see if I can test Tumblr.
3:59 pm
Actually just tested both and they were fine. Are you sure you have the latest version of Agregado?
4:07 pm
Yeah should be the correct one :)
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3009/2848466555_31d4f49f69_o.jpg
Though the PHP Notice: XML error: Invalid document end at line 1, column 1 in …\wp-content\themes\agregado\includes\simplepie.inc on line 1783
error has been there since the first 1.0 release.
4:12 pm
Ah, I removed my Pownce user name and the error vanished, I’ll try to figure it out, cheers for the fast replies :)