Caribou is a fast loading, high performance News Theme designed with features ideal for sophisticated bloggers, online newsletters, newspapers, media groups and others who have complex needs from their WordPress sites.
But what use is a load of blurb when you can simply go to the theme demo and find out for yourself? Try it, come back, and you’ll see where we’re coming from!
- Easy multi-page highlight items from the Write Posts Options
- Automatic image resizing for the highlight spots and thumbnails
- Front page/section slider for top spot items
- Time saving features for busy WP users
- Uses its own WordPress Taxonomy for control
- Sophisticated colour picking controls
- Section & Category colouring for navigational clarity
- Multiple Javascript highlight spots
- Light server & bandwidth load - a full section page can be under 200K
- Great WP compatibility, will not break your WordPress install if you uninstall
- Incredible browser support - works in all browsers we can find, even phones
- Fast rendering even on older computers
- Multiple section support with colour coding for large sites
- All the other stuff we do, ease of use, MU compatibility, and fast loading
Caribou is only available for download to Spectacu.la members and cannot be purchased from any other site. If you find others selling this theme, please let us know!
Screencasts
We have created a series of screencasts for Caribou, with more to come:
The screencasts are currently subtitled only, with the voice track to be added soon.
PHP5 Only
At the moment it’s worth noting that Caribou is designed to take advantage of PHP5 features. If your server is running PHP4 you need to ask your hosts to switch you over. PHP4 is no longer supported and there may no longer be security patches issued this could seriously compromise your server. Caribou now works fine under PHP4, I’d still advise everyone to move over to PHP5.
01st May 2009: The theme has been temporarily withdrawn.
As the club is now 100% GPL we are having to re-work some elements to be compliant. Sorry!
01st July 2009: Caribou is back and 100% GPL compatible.
27th July 2009: Caribou 1.0.6 released with a new ‘wide post’ scheme available to those of you who like more space for your content - this puts the post-meta information below the post rather than in the small sidebar to the right. The commenting engine is now based on our popular javascript based system which is configurable and flexible.
23th December 2009: Caribou 1.0.7 released with updates for Wordpress 2.9 and improved features. Replaced the highlight image picker with a new ajax arrangement that should make assigning thumbnails to posts a lot easier.
DemoDownload
Looks great. I’ll happily give it a test if it helps. I might even use this on my main blog; from that screenshot it looks like it could be quite a good fit for a blog site or magazine.
Hi Daniel - that’ll be great if you can. We’ll make a download of a test version available to members once its ready. Don’t hold your breath though - there’s a lot to do because we really want to make sure this blows away the competition
Initially I was a bit turned off by the new look, but having compared the two side by side I’m won over. I guess you could use the large top right section for comments if you didn’t want advertising in there. And the skyscraper sidebar section gives a reasonable amount of flexibility.
Still looking forward to having a play with it. And looking forward to seeing what the page looks like above that screenshot!
[...] still waiting in the sidelines, but you can already download Caribou and read all about it in the Caribou News Theme page. Posted on November 17, 2008 by Dave Coveney Categorised as: News Tagged as: Caribou, [...]
I’ve updated the theme to version 1.0.1. The update changes PHP5 code to code that’ll work on PHP4. If you’ve downloaded it already download and install the new version.
Guess in another 10 years or so most host will have moved over.
I’d written the code avoiding as many PHP5 only functions as I possibly could however certain practices crept in. There were a few PHP5 things that could have saved me some time which I’d have liked to have been able to use but PHP4 made me do it the hard way.
from where to download this theme?? any one please
Hi - unfortunately we’ve had to temporarily withdraw the theme due to some elements not being able to meet our commitment to the GPL terms.
However, the good news is that most of the work required is complete - we just have a couple of tweeks to get it through the WordPress.org repository requirements, and the new version will become available within a week. Keep watching!
hey its two weeks later…. when can i get caribou … also are your themes seo? are they ad ready?
Theme will be ready when its ready, sorry. 2.8 caused us a lot of extra work, none of which we’ll be getting paid for
For more information about the theme itself check out the demo.
how can I make the info on the post sidebar to be aligned one after another not like:
Post date:
03.08.2009
more like:
Post date: 03.08.2009
These are just some examples, I think you get the point…
I don’t know where to edit…please help!
You’ll need to create a new scheme with more space for those fields. Alternatively use the wide-post scheme, selectable in the theme options (”Customise the theme”), to place this information at the bottom of your site.
hey there,
one question: i use a widget called ad rotation for showing 468×60 ads in the header of the theme, but i always loose 2 pix in the height of the ad. i played around with the plugin and removed the title and everything else. could it be, that the theme itself cuts the banner? or is there any ad rotation plugin you prefer?
thanks a lot,
parser
one another question:
how can i manage to list only some categories in the navigation bar? or how can i exclude some of them?
thx
parser
Hi Parser,
Unfortunately we can’t really offer support here any more unless you become a member. We’re happy to accept bug reports here, and praise, but that’s about it. If users need our support, they have to support us too - otherwise we’ll go hungry!
Hi there ~
Curious if Caribou, or any of your other themes, are customizable to create a three-column layout: left sidebar, main content, right sidebar. Your themes are great and I’d love to use them, but my project definitely needs two widget-ready sidebars.
Well… of course it’s possible, but it wouldn’t be a trivial job. We’ve done something for the US Mission over at http://geneva.usmission.gov which may be what you’re looking for, but it’s beyond the scope of the Spectacu.la club.
Thanks for the quick response. I appreciate it.
Great theme and advancements in design - making Wordpress more and more like a CMS. Describing it as complex is apropos. Took me a while to get my head around it. There are still some things that I had to guess at that are not covered in the video tutorials.
Suggestions: I strongly recommend adding a read.me file in the template that explains a)how to set it up and if there is anything you have to place elsewhere than the theme directory b)explain the relationships between categories, sections, pages, and posts.
Question: What I haven’t been able to figure out is previewimagepicker. Simply doesn’t seem to work for me - fortunately it is not a game killer for the website to lack it but it certainly would spice it up a bit. http://www.OpportunitySustainability.com
I thought it might be a 2.7 v 2.8 issue so I tried running it on a earlier platforms, but to no avail - I just kept getting illegal reference errors popping up on my admin screen. I’ve downloaded it again. Is it a file placement issue? Am I supposed to modify something? I am currently running WP 2.84 Caribou 1.0.6 with php5 and have tested it on WP 2.7-2.85. Any suggestions?
I understand this is not the place for tech support. As there seems to be little work being done lately on this site/forums/new designs, not sure if plopping down $50 is the right move. Now if you can tell me that there is an answer with a solution to my dilemma - I’m all for paying the “membership/service” fee.
Great product people.
Hi Matthew - not sure what’s going wrong with you on the preview image picker element of the theme. It will use WP’s normal uploads folders, so you need to have permissions set right so that it can create the thumbnails. However, if you can attach images to posts then all should be well.
Your images tend to be hotlinked - you need to have them within your blog for this to work, but if you can post your errors or send us a link to a screenshot we’ll log the problem.
Unfortunately in terms of support I can’t really help further unless you’re a member. We do have members and we actively check the forums, but so few have problems that there’s very little going on most of the time!
Matthew - try out the new version of Caribou - it uses a number of changes, some of which should fix your problem.
Hey there,
I’m sure that this is a really obvious thing that I’m missing out but is there any step by step guides avalible that show how to add articles to the Ajax slideshow at the top of the page?
Kind regards,
Daniel
Hey Daniel - just look over at http://spectacu.la/category/screencasts/ where you’ll find that all the screencasts are Caribou related.
Hopefully that will clear it up for you.
Have to admit, we’re changing the way we do this in future themes, using just a widget based approach, but Caribou still has an old-fashioned method.
Sadly the club doesn’t bring enough money in at the moment, but we do have plans…
Quick question. I am putting preview images in the excerpt box so they will show up on the home section page. For posts that already contained an image, I was getting duplicate pictures. So for those posts, I didn’t include the image in the excerpt box. But the image on the main page was only 64×64. I changed the width/height on the following section of the sectiontemplate.php.
$excerptThumb = (function_exists(’PIPPGetImage’) ? PIPPGetImage(’excerptthumb’,$post->ID,false,true) : null);
if ($excerptThumb) {?>
<a href=”">
<img src=”" class=”excetptThumb” alt=”" width=”150″ height=”150″/>
I wanted to make the thumbnail picture on the main page larger, to 150×150. But it appears to shrink the image to 64×64 first, then blow it back up to 150×150, making it very blurry.
Any suggestions, either to make the image not blurry or to avoid the duplicate images when I put the picture in the excerpt box?
I apologize if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty inexperienced with this. Here is my URL if it helps. http://pittsburghlumberco.com
P.S. How do you adjust the number of posts on the front page when you are using a section home page? Thanks.
Hi Matt - much as we’d like to help, it costs us enough time to create the free themes. We can’t also support them for free. You can join Spectacu.la where we’ll do our best to help, or you can contact http://www.interconnectit.com which is our consulting firm where we may be able to do more for you on an hourly rate.
But for a clue - if you change your WP settings you’ll get different sizes. No need to change code in most cases.
Understandable. Thanks for the quick response. Appreciate it.
J’aimerai bien le tester sur notre blog mais je ne sais pas si il fonctionne bien
I like Caribou, thank you. But why did I install the Caribou template, I can not set the CMS model?
Have you looked at the screencasts? http://spectacu.la/category/screencasts/
plz help me
i have installed caribou theme but it not work with full feature.
i have seen more feature on ur page but i cant enabled it on my site
Emon - you probably want to view the screencasts over in http://spectacu.la/category/screencasts/ to get the best out of the theme. These should help.
Hi there,
First, compliments for your theme. It’s very easy to use. I would like to know how I can activate the Front page/section slider. Can’t seem to find it anywhere!
Thanks in advance for reply.