Guzel: A Really Cool WordPress Theme
By Christian Little • Oct 2nd, 2008 • Category: WordpressThis isn’t a paid ad or blog post, I’m actually posting this because I love the theme and think it deserves some attention.
A website called Custom Theme Design recently released a wordpress theme called Guzel, and the first version was pretty impressive. It has some really neat built-in features, and the actual design is very nice.
However not too long ago they took all the feedback and released a new version called Guzel PRO (and no, it’s not a paid theme despite the ‘PRO’ part added to the name).
Some of the really cool features of this theme include:
- The PRO version has this nifty language customization page where you just change the words into your native language, and it instantly converts the theme into your langauge.
- They re-wrote the built-in “the_content” function for wordpress so it will display the first image in the post on the homepage without any extra coding.
- The entire site uses some very cool AJAX coding, such as the block on the top-right corner that displays various posts by certain condition (i.e. Newest, Popular, etc).
- It has Feedburner built right into it (sweet!)
- Did I mention it’s a free theme?
Now there are a few downsides that I’ll warn you about:
- Modifying the theme is a pain in the ass. I pulled it apart line-by-line to add a lot of custom things to it on a new site I built with it.
- I found the language switching code didn’t work for some reason. I suspect it was because of some misconfiguration on my part, as everybody else it seems to work just ducky with.
Overall the actual look and feel of the design is very nice. It’s easy on the eyes, and the navigation structure is fairly straight forward. Additionally, there’s very little graphic/distracting elements which makes it ideal for people to find you actual content rather than be distracted by the shiny bits.
If you are looking to build a really sleek and sexy blog, this is definately one of the better themes I’ve ever seen and highly recommend it.
Official Website: http://customthemedesign.com/
Related Reviews of the Guzel Theme:
Any of you fine folks tried this theme?
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Christian Little is a web monkey and owner of this website. Aside from blogging about webmastering, SEO, and marketing, he spends his time with his family, running too many websites, playing counter-strike, and provides SEO consulting for a few select clients around the world.
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Hi Christian,
First thanks for your review.
Indeed there was a misconfiguration on our end for editing language directly on control panel. So this feature is taken off until its properly implemented. However, you can still edit a simple language file in /languages folder and have changes reflect immediately.
It can be a bit tricky to customize the theme, since a lot of template code have been used to allow for template options / featured sections / and that can be a pain . Thats very true. I want to hear your suggestions and I am trying to do my best to implement new features to meet users’ recommendations.
Thank you.
Ahmads last blog post..Guzel Magazine Has Been Updated
Was that written in the readme files included with the template Ahmad? I must have missed it somewhere as I didn’t find out about the language coding not working until I actually activated the theme and went to the site in question, and even then I didn’t see anything on your site about this issue so I thought it was just a bug in my WP installation.
Unfortunately. My mistake.. I discovered the bug a bit late after release so I quickly took the language editor off control panel. No, it should not be any issue with your WP installation. It was some bad logic in the control panel and I am trying to come with this feature again but after appropriate testing to avoid this bug in the near term. Thanks,.
I was thinking to use Drupal vs Wordpress for my next site, one of important aspects was theme though WP has more of them but most are garbage this Guzel pro theme made me think again of taking WP as platform
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Would you mind posting the link of your modified theme? I am about to do the same for an entertainment website which I believe this theme will be a perfect fit for.
Nash - email me and I’ll send you the theme. I basically ripped out the variables that weren’t working and made some other modifications that seem to work. You can reach me at chris@christianlittle.com.
Hey, very interesting post.
My written English is not so good so I write in German:
“Lieber den Spatz in der Hand, als die Taube auf dem Dach.”
Yours sincerely
Eisen
I think this is a very cool layout and theme. I plan to install it next time I go through a re-design which is every 2 weeks.
i love seeing new cool themes like this one. Its time for me to switch to wordpress.
What a very clean design! This was EXACTLY what I was looking for as a ‘basis’ before heavy modification of CSS and some other variables. Thanks alot for posting this! I may be emailing you as well to get that file that you ‘modified’. I really can’t emphasize how happy I am that I came across this post.
I think this is a very cool layout and theme.