The theme is new and improved, but the download page remains the same. Please have a look and go play around with the live Mimbo 3.0 demo. Obviously WordPress itself has gone through major changes since Aug ’07 so it was high time for a makeover, not to mention keeping up with all of version 2.7′s new features. I’ve also gotten a lot of feedback via the forums and have incorporated whatever suggestions I could.
Speaking of which, those forums are now defunct. For support (not necessarily my own) on all projects associated with this website, please visit the new forums. That includes Agregado, TimThumb and so on.
The New Approach
In the past, a new version of Mimbo meant you might have to overwrite the color/typography changes you’d already made. Or else, you’d have to hunt around in the stylesheet and compare edits.
Starting with Mimbo 3.0, I’d like the upgrade process to be much easier. Along those lines, for anyone doing major modifications I would recommend you build a child theme containing any styles and templates you wish to append. Please see the download page for more details and check out the sample child theme, “Vintage Green”.
Mimbo is also now fully localized, but I need help actually creating .po/.mo files for various languages. Please get in touch if you would like to contibute your translation skills.
Mimbo continues to be free and licensed under the GPL, but I am inserting a PayPal donation button on the download page for the first time. If you use Mimbo for building multiple sites, especially commercial sites, please consider dropping a few bucks in the hat.
Also, a big thanks to Ian Stewart and Justin Tadlock for beta-testing. In terms of WordPress wisdom, there aren’t two more knowledgeable guys around.
The New Features
- No more custom fields. Most importantly, custom fields are no longer necessary to call thumbnails. Mimbo 3.0 includes a script that pulls images automatically from the post body, then resizes them with TimThumb.
- Support for WordPress 2.7. This includes code for sticky posts, comment pagination, threaded comments, wp_logout_url, and the rest of the new features.
- Sticky Posts. In the past, you had to create a “Lead Story” category. With the new version, that beige box contains whichever post you’ve marked as sticky, or whichever is most recent.
- Standard Bloggy Behavior. What I learned about Mimbo 2.2 is that a lot of people missed having a regular old blog component on the homepage, ie, simple chronological display. So I tried to retain the popular magazine-style layout, while organizing the middle column more like a standard blog.
- Featured Categories. Thanks to some great coding help from the talented Jean-Baptiste, Mimbo 3.0 has a custom control panel that sets featured categories with a configurable number of headlines
- Localization/Translation. As I’ve realized, there’s really no excuse for not localizing your WP themes so they can be enjoyed by people all over the world. Feel free to contact me with translation help.
- 125×125 Ad Support. Mimbo 3.0 comes pre-styled to work with the excellent WP125 plugin and its companion widget.
- Better body id/classes. As I’ve written about, this can make your theme tremendously flexible, but now things are even flexible-er. Tip of the hat goes to Thematic, by way of Sandbox.
- Multi-Level Dropdown Menus. People asked for them and now they’re here. They’re semi-transparent, too, if you use a decent browser.
- Custom Sidebar Conditionals. If child pages exist, they will now appear in the sidebar when viewing a page section. And on single post pages, the sidebar will dynamically display a handy “Related Posts” box.
- Better Custom Archives. Personally, I almost never browse by month or year. I prefer a full archived list with dated headers. Mimbo 3.0 comes with a custom template that displays posts organized by month, plus pagination.
- Better Author Archives. Looking back, it’s not really necessary to have the author bio included at the bottom of every single post, as with v2.2. In the new version, author archives can be viewed only when the person’s name is clicked. Also, gravatars are now used for both author photos and comments. No more lame hacks.
- Gallery, Inline Image & Caption Styling. There are now styles for all the various ways you’d insert an image in a post which became possible with version 2.5.
- More Widget Freedom. In the past, I probably included too much custom code in the sidebar whereas most of it could be replicated/re-ordered with widgets anyway. So currently, the entire right-hand sidebar (minus the aforementioned Page submenu and “Related Posts” module) is widgetized and pre-styled for your pleasure.
Note: I have closed comments on the official download page and am directing support questions to the new forum….
2:54 pm
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to beta test it. Mimbo is still one of the best WordPress themes, even after it was released over a year ago.
I’m also glad you’re asking people to use child themes for modifications.
3:23 pm
The design & structure is just too good to be true for a free themes :)
have you considered using sIFR? to make it more flashy :D
4:17 pm
Thank Dian, I’ll consider sIFR in the future. I’ve always held off just because I assumed most people used plugins for sIFR titles.
3:36 pm
So much nicer that the later, congrats!
3:37 pm
Damn good job, Darren! Looks great, gonna test it this weekend :-)
4:13 pm
Mmm… Mimbo. I knew that Child Themes thing would bite Ben :)
Looks good. Thank you!
BTW, what’s the scoop for MimboPro?
4:20 pm
Thanks Kel (and you didn’t get caught in my spam filter this time!). I want to monitor the release of Mimbo 3.0 for a couple weeks, vet it, use it as a guinea pig and otherwise see it in the wild before adding the new functionality to Mimbo Pro, but that upgrade will come soon enough hopefully. Similar plans for it: new thumbnail script, localization, child theming, better pagination, etc.
4:51 pm
Darren,
I strayed for a moment.. but i’m in the process of redesigning the site once again… Looks like i’m right back to using Mimbo. I have my work cut out for me this weekend
5:53 pm
I would start using and customizing mimbo 2.2 just days before 3.0 is released… just my luck…
6:40 pm
Thank you for sharing this great theme.
Any special reason why you moved the support forum from Vanilla to bbPress?
11:11 pm
I mainly wanted to integrate bbPress with WordPress to share user data, allow cookies/registration across both blog and forums, etc. I like Vanilla fine, but am accustomed enough with WP that integrating with bb seemed like a natural fit.
8:12 pm
I just tried downloading and unzipping the file, but for some reason I get an error every time I try to extract. Is anyone else getting this or is it a problem on my end? I have tried with two different OS and programs. Thanks!
10:32 pm
I just tested on both Mac and PC with no trouble. If anyone has technical difficulty, please make sure to post to the forum.
10:54 am
Nice theme!~
thk for 100….
1:12 am
Awesome Theme Darren. Thanks for sharing it for free.
I’m playing around with a theme, I have some question …
1. How can I control the thumbnail of the front page ?! I have a large image in my post, but as it get resize in front page, some of it’s part is chopped off. how can I make my own thumbnail (even if the image is not in the post) !? what if I don’t want my thumbnail would be the first image in my post ?!
2. In a demo version, I noticed that the front page sidebar is differ from posts. How Can I control each page sidebar individually ?!
3. Is there any common plugin for ads ?! How can I have the same ads plugin in demo version ?!
Thanks a lotttt.
7:24 pm
1) You can crop your own images in Photoshop if the autocrop doesn’t work for you
2) No, the sidebar is global throughout the theme, other than the modules (Related Posts) mentioned in the documentation
3) There is a link to the WP125 plugin in the documentation
12:36 pm
Thanks darren.
But I did try the old method of adding custom fields “Image” by giving the image that I cropped it in Photoshop. but the image is not showing it self up. it pulls the first image of my post & automatically resize it.
How can I control the front page image & put my own image ?!
12:58 pm
The old method (custom fields) is no longer applicable. The new method is to use WP’s native image upload feature. If you want to crop your images before uploading, you may do that in Photoshop. If you have other technical questions, go ahead and post to the forums.
5:36 pm
Thank you – we are looking at using this for our blog!
6:59 pm
This might be a stupid question, but still, I’m curious. Why is the support forum for TimThumb on darrenhoyt.com, rather than category4.com? I thought maybe it was a category4 thing?
7:23 pm
It wasn’t released as a category4 thing, just as a collaboration with Tim during the production of Mimbo Pro, which was otherwise a solo project.
10:38 pm
I just downloaded version 3.0 and like someone else said, just my luck I had just finished getting everything on 2.2, styling, etc.
Can I put a custom logo in 3.0 like you were able to in 2.2?
Being new to wordpress, this has been quite the experience and your theme is increidble! Have gotten a lot of great feedback and frankly, gaining clientele becasue they are so impressed with my site.
Thanks!
2:07 pm
wow thanks for releasing this for free. I am learning a lot about wordpress by looking at your themes
6:00 pm
Hi Darien.
Thank you for this great theme.
I have a simple question: Does the them work well with wordpress 2.9? if it does, do I need to do something in order to get the categories in the menu?
Greetings.
6:09 pm
Sorry!! I meant wordpress 2.7.
Thank you
6:11 pm
One more time I am sorry.
The question is: How can I get the categories listed in the top menu?
Greetings.
7:08 pm
it should list the categories automatically
5:37 am
Hi Raptrex.
Yes, you are right, I was not very smart yesterday,
The poblem:
- The categories weren’t listed in the menu.
The Solution:
- It has to be a least one post before the categories appear in the menu.
Cheers!.
5:49 am
Amazing new features, Darren
Thanks for releasing it for free
11:10 am
I like this template very much, It has clean design and I like templates which has 125 x 125 banner ads in the sidebar
12:54 pm
When I activated the site, for some reason after each comment, this appears:
This is after a comment, not a trackback. What could be the cause of this?
9:38 pm
Sorry, Chris, but I failed to notice your comment before posting mine. Please see my comment for a fix.
Basically, just replace any occurences of <? with <?php and you should be good.
12:26 am
This should be fixed now, per Bradford’s suggestion below. Unfortunately I can’t recreate the problem itself, so anyone who’s experiencing, please post to the forum.
2:10 pm
wow thanks for releasing this for free. I am learning a lot about wordpress by looking at your themes
9:36 pm
I found a slight problem with the theme, but it was easily remedied:
comments.php has some lingering php short open tags (“<?” instead of “<?php”) causing the associated PHP code to show up in the comments section instead of being processed when short open tags are disabled (as they should be).
Hope this helps someone else who has the same problem.
6:17 am
Great theme, but I don’t like images in the post being set with margin (margin: 10px; as I view it through Dreamweaver). I’ve gone through the css files but cannot identify the block which holds the images.
How could I remove the margin?
Thanks
7:09 am
Great looking theme which I will be looking to use.
Just one question though: posts come up with the date in m/d/y order and I would prefer them to be d/m/y if possible? Is there an easy way of changing this as changing the date settings in WordPress 2.7 doesn’t seem to do anything?
Thanks in advance!
8:46 pm
Mimbo has been a big part of my most recent employment at a newspaper. Thanks for the great theme, and thanks for the great recent upgrades!
12:54 am
Very cool – which newspaper?
7:18 pm
Thanks for making your work freely available!
One question though…is there a way to reorder the categories so they don’t run in alphabetical order for your menu? I tried the My Category Order plugin but it didn’t seem to work. Any help is greatly appreciated!
9:59 pm
Hi Darren,
I am thinking of using your template for a blog in Japanese language. The problem is, the template does not recognize japanese words, as there is no spaces to separate them.
The post then is fully displayed in the main page, instead of only the excerpt.
Would it be possible to make the automatic excerpt to count the characters instead of the words?
Thanks.
12:30 am
You would have to edit the core WP files to determine character-count vs. word-count. There’s nothing in the theme to control this.
12:52 am
how to custom widgate and color ?
4:58 pm
Hey Darren,
First, I want to say…your themes are great. I am fairly new the world of css and have chosen to use your vintage green mimbo, so far it seem mostly perfect…for some reason on my left side column that is supposed to have the featured categories this code is written:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home7/thebitt1/public_html/wp-content/themes/mimbo/index.php on line 88
this could have to do with the downloading/extracting process…it seems that when all the code info is in one folder everything extract with no issue but when the download comes in several folders (as was the vintage) there are problems extracting (for instance it would keep saying there was a duplicate or it was unencrypted etc )
I’m also not a computer geek though literate. what do i need to do to fix this.
thx so much,
Sanaa
5:02 pm
Please see item #1 in “Getting Things Configured” -
“In your control panel, click Appearance->Mimbo Options and select your featured categories. This will insert content in the left sidebar of the homepage”
5:12 pm
Thanks man!
I have added you to my blogroll…you are really awesome.
5:49 pm
Thanks man!
ok. another silly question. how can I make the tags have the different font sizes and styles like on the mimbo demo? only one of my words is changed but i don’t know how it happened and i’d like to do more of it.
thx
10:07 am
Great work, Darren! Thanks a lot for that wonderful free WP theme!
Kind regards and best wishes
JCG
1:52 pm
Sorry, but I dont use the forum.
In footer.php, the wp_footer tag is duplicated. Statics aperar twice and everything that use this tag.
But the theme is great!!!
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