StudioBlue Version 2 - Take control!

As you know, I am in the process of renovating and reviewing my old Themes in an attempt to improve their functionality. My main goal is to significantly improve the theme options menu and give my users more control over their blog. With StudioBlue 2.0, you'll get a much wider array of theme options that I hope will improve your blogging experience. Here is a quick overview of what I added:

1. Color-Scheme-Switcher Blog

In the theme options menu, you can now choose between 5 unique color combinations. This is handled by a simple drop-down menu, and you can switch between each color at any time.

2. Optional blog style post style

If you don't like the CMS style font page, or think it just doesn't fit the contents / subject of your blog, you can simply switch to “Blog Style”. This is also done via a simple drop-down menu, and you can switch back and forth at any time.

3. Improved ad management

I've added several new banner options, each of which is managed through the theme's options menu. Plus, each of these banners is optional! You can turn them on and off from the options menu, and you are free to have any combination of banners you like. The available banner options are:

• 4 125x125px banners in the sidebar
• 1 250 × 250 banner in the sidebar
• 1 × 468 banner on message pages
• 1 × 728 Leaderboard above contents

4. Drop-down menu for optional categories

I added a drop down menu function to the category navigation bar. This is also optional and can be turned on and off from the theme options menu.

5. Additional home page settings

You can now choose to toggle on / off the various homepage elements including the featured articles section, down category areas, and popular / random article lists. You can also choose the number of featured articles to display, the number of recent articles to display, and the number of recent articles to display in the category boxes (which is also a new feature in itself).

6. Additional post-page settings

You can now turn off thumbnails on post pages. In some cases, the thumbnail served as a preview for an image that was already included in the post, in which case you might not want a thumbnail on the post page at all. You can also choose to enable / disable the tab menu below the message. I have also added the ability to change the comment style from the currently active "graphic" style to a more minimal style without images or gravatars. (I deleted the gravatar plugin and now use the native wordpress gravatar function)

7. Improved options interface

Other than that, I just tried to improve the look of the options page itself. It used to get quite cluttered before, and now has a much more organized interface:

There are also other options available, you just need to update them and play with yourself. This is the kind of functionality you can soon expect from all my Themes, especially all new versions of Themes. Hope everyone is doing well, stay tuned for more updates!