Wordpress Theme Needed for renting out stuff!
March 10, 2010 6:44 AM   Subscribe

I rent out stuff. My current website is a dated html-nightmare. What I want is a new, easy to maintain Wordpress-website. What I can't find is a template/theme that does the things I want it to do out-of-box.

I know just enough about php, css and html to modify an existing template. Building one is out of the question. Themes like Thesis are overkill and too complicated.

So what I'm really looking for is this:
  • Wordpress. I know how WP works and I don't want to invest a lot of time in learning something new
  • A top menu bar
  • 1 page per product. A productpage contains several pictures, a description and preferably a contact form.
  • The frontpage should show all products and a short description. If possible, it should get both the picture and the description from the productpage so I don't have to change anything twice whenever a page is updated. I want to be able to specify which pages show up on the frontpage though. A lot of themes that are allmost there can do this - but only with blogposts, not pages.
  • the frontpage should have a section that shows the latest blog posts. This will be used a a news section. It should be able to contain pictures as well.
  • The frontpage should also have a general section where I can put static text. A large footer would be nice for this.
  • font substtution should be possible. I'd rather have it work with @fontface, than things like cufon. But I'm not too fussy.
  • It should preferably be clean. I know how to remove and replace unwanted backgrounds and borders, but I'd rather not have to.
  • It can be free or paid, but as this is more of a hobby than anything else: the cheaper, the better.
  • Foreign language support (mainly dutch and german) would be a bonus.
Basically, what I need is a combination of a portfolio, a magazine and a webshop theme.
It feels like I've seen every single theme on the entire internet, but I might just have missed one.
If anyone can help me out, or at least point me in the right (or better) direction, I'd be very very grateful!
posted by Sourisnoire to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Something like this? Not sure about multiple language support for this though.
posted by white_devil at 7:09 AM on March 10, 2010


I think there are a lot of themes that will get you pretty close to what you want to do, but it's extremely unlikely you'll find one that does all this exactly. Multilingual support isn't implemented at the theme level, I don't think—you'd need a plugin like this.

Getting an abstract and photo of each item onto the front page would probably require some creative structuring, at the very least. You'd need to create custom field type for these pages to contain the abstract, and possibly another to contain the front-page photo.

I had a similar project recently, where I found a theme that got me about 3/4 of the way there, and hacked on it for a day or so to get it the rest of the way. I think you'll need to do the same (or pay someone to do it for you).
posted by adamrice at 7:27 AM on March 10, 2010


One question - do you have to use pages for your products, rather than just using posts with a separate tag or category? It seems like it would be relatively easy to put a section on the main page showing posts from a particular category/tag in one section, and typical "blog" posts elsewhere on the page, and that would solve your problem with updating the product page and main page simultaneously. You could also use the post excerpt as the short description for the product, with more details in the post body that is not displayed on the main page.

I have always built my own themes, so I don't really know what's out there for the grabbing, but I have had a tough time using @fontface calls. There seems to be some good workarounds, but I'd be surprised if many themes out there contain such css out of the box, since there can be significant licensing issues with uploading fonts to a webserver - you're likely to have to add it on your own. Also see Mozilla's WOFF, which is seeing support from a few type foundries.
posted by dilettanti at 7:48 AM on March 10, 2010


Response by poster: @white_devil: That's actually one of the themes I've looked at that comes close. If nothing better comes up, yours is probably going to be marked best answer... Not looking forward to the tweaking though, but at least it seems to have some decent support.

@adamrice: Was that project similar enough for me to use the same theme?

@diettanti: I suppose I could use posts. I mentioned pages because I want the date stamp to show in the news section, but not in the product descriptions, and I have no idea how to turn it on/off depending on the post.
posted by Sourisnoire at 7:56 AM on March 10, 2010


Thematic at themeshaper.com is a really good, and very flexible, theme that you can customize in a million different ways using child themes. I'd give it a shot.
posted by teedee2000 at 4:51 PM on March 10, 2010


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