This theme’s been something of a major job for us - we decided to introduce a whole raft of new technology… you have completely configurable navigation with tabs, a menu bar and footer navigation as well as the usual widgets.  But you can set it to be automatic too.

Similarly, we’ve introduced the concept of sections.  A category can be assigned to one or multiple sections, meaning that you can have a sports section separate to a news section, for example, or even ten different sections… all with their own colour for the mini-bullets and lines.  And of course, what would colour coding be without an easy to use colour picker?

We believe Caribou is the most flexible and powerful WordPress theme on the market - it allows WordPress users to create fully featured news websites quickly and efficiently.  The code is ultra-clean and fast, placing a light load on the server, so there’s plenty of scope for extending and customising.

There’s a demo already available, albeit with a few tweaks still waiting in the sidelines, but you can already download Caribou and read all about it in the Caribou News Theme page.

Caribou is probably the most flexible, powerful and yet easy to use WordPress theme available today. It’s very much a platform theme and will form the basis for other premium themes for Interconnect IT. It’s designed to be easy to work with, fast to load (important for a busy news site), fast to render and be light on the server.

“Caribou’s development has cost us more in both money and man-hours than any other theme we’ve built, including client work - it introduces new concepts to WordPress while at the same time maintaining standard functionality, working on multiple installations and being tolerant of server issues. It really is a tour-de-force and will be the basis from which many varied designs will come.” — David Coveney

We also test all our themes with real data. Not carefully selected, carefully trimmed excerpts that just fit a certain space perfectly, and Caribou is designed to look good even if you have a team of writers who know nothing about layout, html or design. “It Should Just Work” is a guiding principle at Spectacu.la.

Beta Download †

Caribou-beta1.zip

† Please note that this theme is for members only, and may lag behind the demo in terms of features and design.

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:

• Creating Sections
• Setting Up Your Home Page
• Setting Up Navigation

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.

01^st 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!

01^st July 2009: Caribou is back and 100% GPL compatible.

27^th 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.

23^th 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.

We’ll be using this theme as the basis for a number of other blogger themes, most of which will be released as member exclusives first, before being exposed to the bigger world of GPL.

We’re setting out to make a wide range of themes - we’ve noticed a lot of rival theme designers produce heavily commercialised themes, designed with advertising in mind. We tend to concentrate on building themes for businesses, clubs and non-commercial individuals. So Blend, for example, allows you to create a brochure style site while at the same time running a blog, all within WordPress. Anvil and Grassland, however, are all about blogging. They’re customisable and flexible but most tend to keep things as they are, or just change the logos used.

There won’t be any new themes for at least a couple of weeks while we prepare for the release of our magazine theme. Watch this space!

However, we’re expecting to go beta with the site in early July 2008, with an official launch at the UK WordCamp.

So keep checking back, or pick our rss feeds, to see the beta launch.