Citizen Press
Citizen Press is a GPL, open source newspaper WordPress theme framework that is currently under development. I started Citizen Press as part of my Master’s Thesis, which examined how WordPress, a weblog publishing platform, can be used as a content management system for community newspaper websites. Because it is free and open source, WordPress has emerged as a viable alternative to its commercial counterparts. During the Summer of 2010, Citizen Press will be released to the WordPress community so that community and school newspapers may use it.
View the Demo Installation (NOTE: The theme is still under active development, so there WILL be bugs and random errors in the demo installation at any given moment): http://www.pixelplanethemes.com/citizenpress/demo
Currently, The Carrboro Citizen (http://www.carrborocitizen.com/main), a community newspaper that covers the town of Carrboro, NC, is beta testing the theme. The editor of The Carrboro Citizen and myself are working together to prepare Citizen Press for release.
Here are just a few of the great features of Citizen Press:
- Grid-based layouts, based on the 1KB Grid by Tyler Tate. Through the options panel, users can choose from four grid configurations, each of which provides an overall site width and a base layout structure.
- The ability to set the width of every column on the site using grid units. The system is flexible enough to recognize different maximum grid units depending on the grid configuration chosen by the user.
- An innovative “templatebits” feature which treats sidebars and “newsboxes” (blocks of content) as portable — users decide where on the page to place these elements by simply typing their file names in the desired location via the options panel.
- A built-in font and color editor which allows users to select base font sizes and font families. They can then tweak the font sizes and colors of many individual site elements.
- For more advanced users, Citizen Press supports customization by way of Child Themes, hooks and filters. Using hooks, it’s possible to dynamically add new columns to various pages on the site without touching the template files!
- Citizen Press will also be internationalized, standards-compliant and will be tested on all major browsers for compatibility.
- Future releases will support BuddyPress.
My goal is to release Citizen Press to the WordPress community during August of 2010.