Today we have an interesting free WordPress theme, based on a design by Solucija. This theme does not have a standard blog layout by default, as you can see from the demo. It is designed for a more CMS look, and has a few features you wouldn’t expect to see in a normal WordPress blog theme. More info on how to use the theme will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now more information on how to use the Small Studio theme…

Small Studio Theme Default Settings

• Pages and categories are displayed on the left sidebar.
• Homepage text can be controlled in the “Header Text” and “Footer Text” widget area, or in about.php (header) and downbox.php (footer) manually.
• Sidebar text can be controlled in the “Side Text” widget area by placing a text widget there.
• 1 featured article excerpt displayed on the homepage.
• 8 more recent articles displayed on the homepage.

If you’re not good at reading lists, I’ve also made this diagram to better understand the areas of the theme. Click the image to enlarge.

Tips on using this theme

• If you don’t want comments, simply disable them in WordPress or on specific pages/posts and nothing will show up.
• If you want to manage a few pages but still maintain a blog section, use a single category called “Blog” (or similar) to store all of your blog posts. Remove the /category/ base for added effect.
• Delete the home.php if you’d rather have a standard blog layout.

This theme is not for everyone

This theme is not really for huge blogs with tons of posts and categories, but rather for business sites looking to manage a few pages and blog posts within the WordPress system. Since categories and pages are both displayed on the sidebar, it probably won’t look good if you have too many listed there.

Conclusion

I know this isn’t the standard style blog theme, but hopefully you’ll like it anyway. Let me know what you think in the comments, and if you’d be interested in more of these “CMS style” themes. I would love to hear your thoughts.