So you’ve downloaded the latest version of Wordpress and uploaded it to your site. You’ve looked through all of the included themes and you can’t find anything that’s to your liking. So you start looking for a theme elsewhere on the web. I’ll use a theme called Arthemia2 as an example.

Adding the theme to your server

Simply extract the theme from the zip file and upload it to the /wp-content/themes directory.  Then, head to the admin panel and click on the thumbnail for your theme by going to Design->Themes and scrolling through the Available Themes.

Add some Categories

When using the Arthemia2 theme, you’ll notice that there is a Headline and a Featured section.  To use these sections you’ll have to create a Category for each.  Again, in the admin panel, go to Write->Post.  Scroll to the Categories subheading and add a category called ‘Headline’ and one called ‘Featured’.

You will also want to add your own custom categories for the navigation in the middle of the page.  Add the categories to the Categories section the same way you did the first Headline and Featured categories.  Then you’ll need to change the index.php file to display the correct categories.  So head to Design->Theme Editor and click Main Index Template (index.php) on the right sidebar.

Scroll down until you see a line that is similar to:

<?php $display_categories = array(3,4,5,6,7); $i = 1;

Inside the array() method you need to add the key to the categories that you wish, in the order that you wish to see them on the index page. Note that you do not need 5 categories, and they don’t have to be arranged in numerical order. Using my categories as an example, if I wanted to make ‘personal’ the first category and I wanted to remove ‘design’, I’d change the code to:

<?php $display_categories = array(7,4,5,6); $i = 1;

Widgets/Plugins

First off, you should check and make sure that your server is running with PHP5. I was having problems with a couple of these widgets and until I found out that my server was still running PHP4, I ran around in circles with no idea what was wrong. If you don’t know what level of PHP you have, the easiest way is to upload a phpinfo file to your server. Verify the PHP level is PHP5 and you should be good to go.

First, you’ll want to add the ‘recent posts’ widget. Go to the admin panel->Design->Widgets. In the right sidebar use the dropdown to select Footer Left, and then press Show. Then find the Recent Posts widget and click Add. You can do the same with the ‘most commented’ widget in Footer Center.

For some reason, the ‘most viewed’ widget is different. You actually have to download the WP-PostView Plugin. After downloading the plugin, extract it, and upload it to /wp-content/plugins/. Then, go back to the admin panel->Plugins. The Plugins tab is on the right side of the admin panel. Then you need to activate both WP-PostViews and the WP-PostViews widget.

Add Thumbnails

If you want thumbnails for you posts, upload the images in your post. Still under Write->Post, scroll down to Custom fields and add a field with key ‘Image’ (no apostrophes) and then give the path to the image as the value. WordPress takes care of the resizing for you.

Random Tips

Full Articles on the Front Page
Instead of showing the excerpts for posts on the front page, I wanted to display full blog posts. Go to the admin panel->Design->Theme Editor and open the index.php page. To do this, scroll to:

<div class="spoiler"> <?php $values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); if (isset($values[0])) { ?> <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"> <img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="150px" height="150px" /></a> <?php } ?> <?php the_excerpt(); ?> </div>

and remove it, replacing it with:

<div class="post"><?php the_content();?></div>

Be sure to make your div’s class ‘post’ so that it has the correct styling.

Change Excerpt Length
The default ‘excerpt’ length for this theme is 90 characters. If you want to change the length of the excerpt go to the admin panel->Design->Theme Editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) and change the $excerpt_length variable in the custom_trim_excerpt() method.

If there is anything else that would be helpful for you, post a comment and I’d be happy to try to help.

A couple sites that helped me write this article are:
http://michaelhutagalung.com/forum/forum.php?id=1
http://michaelhutagalung.com/2008/05/arthemia-magazine-blog-wordpress-theme-released/?cp=25