Liquid Gallery Premium Wordpress Theme Review
Every wordpress theme is different in it’s own way, but Liquid Gallery theme is taking things further. It’s beautiful, and does not look like a wordpress theme, but it is, and what it does is it gives you a gallery interface for your website where you can add all the photos you want and view them using it’s unique interface. It’s simple, but powerful at the same time. You get to use hight resolution images on the full page and show any product or design you wish for your company, employer or friends.
Starting with the good stuff, the home page could not be more simple.
Content
Home Page
Simple but nice logo on the top left and the menu at the top right. Colors from background and text combine and form a perfect fit for the theme look and feel. The most popular feature on this theme is the slideshow that’s covering most of the content part and is made out of pictures and a little hovering title at the top left. You get to place all your large pictures to fit right in the slideshow and you get to slide from left to right, one image after the other using the little arrows at the bottom or by clicking on the numbers.On the left side of the home page comes some custom text that you get to change in the admin;simple but powerful.
The Menu
As usual, simple is most common and better for menus. You don’t need anything more than a nice font and good alignment and spacing. Light on select, the menu is doing it’s job just right
So how is a normal page looking then in the Liquid Gallery theme? Just like the admin, only with no titles on the pictures and of course different content and title on the left side. Nothing much changes here…
Page Template
But that’s not the only content style you get to use. You also have Themes for each page in the admin when creating pages, so you get to choose how you want your theme to look. For example, this is a normal about page:
Again, nothing complex, everything king of like it already was, only one picture at the left and the title and text on the right of that with a optional extra info at the very right of the content, just like in the image above. The templates don’t end here.There is one more feature that you don’t see into the picture above. The picture on the left can be more than one and there is a fading transition between them. How’s that for “unexpected cool”?
Contact Page Template
Just in case you’re wondering about how will your other visual elements, like forms, will look on this particular gallery styled theme, here’s your answer:
Your basic contact form with information on the left and the actual contact form on the right, it’s well organized and aligned and the forms are very well integrated into the design. So again a design feature that you don’t have to worry about as it’s built in and works great.
Errors
No, I did not find errors on the theme… what I’m trying to describe here is one more particular thing that got my attention while using this theme, and that is the errors handling. So for example when you go to a contact page while using this theme, submit it and you misspell your email or trying to see if it allows any text there instead of a email, the contact form script knows you are doing something wrong and it will give you a visual error. Now it’s not the feature, but how it is shown.
Small simple humble little box with a back link and absolutely nothing else on the page. I like it! Impressions?
Now for the back-end stuff…
The Admin Panel
Page Templates
As I said before, the theme supports certain page templates that you can add to your pages and use to make each page do something specific.
So you have a about type page like shown before, contact page with the form and text on the left(you get to edit the text) and a gallery page (like the home page and the other gallery pages).
This is really useful if you want to use this theme as you should and exploit it’s full potential. So go to pages and start customizing as soon as you install the theme.
Admin Page
So there’s a page under Appearance -> Liquid Gallery Options that actually is the main admin panel page for the theme.
(Click Image to Expand)
The first part (screenshot above) is allowing you to change the home page title and content text as well as the footer text how ever you want.
Then there’s the number of columns of thumbnails the theme must show in the sidebar and at the very bottom, configuring (signing) the gallery category for all the images that will need to go in a gallery.
I’ve jumped one particular feature that did not want to just say while passing trough the rest of the options in the admin.
Color Scheme
The very first option in the admin panel is the Color Scheme. This simple drop-down box allows you to select a different color scheme for your theme. You could even say, that your theme is allowing you to change your… theme. It’s not a radical change but it’s a nice one as it changes all colors acourdingly.
And there you have it. Three different color types that you get to choose : bright, dark or default (in the order of the example above). What ever meets your purpose, you have the possibility to chose colors too.
What have we learned?
That if you’re looking to create a gallery website you don’t have to deal with modifying a design or building it from scratch as it’s already been made especially for your needs. You just need to download, install and configure it. It’s that simple. You can see how a simple design does wonders and a dark design or specially made light version can do even more if you’re looking for a gallery style website.
This particular theme is for Wordpress 2.8 which is great that it supports the latest actual version and it is working, was tested and showing in all it’s design and functionality glory on Firefox2 and 3, IE6, IE7 and Safari. Kudos for that!
If you have questions or find anything that seems “fishy” in the theme, be sure to contact the developer.
