Desk Space WordPress Theme
Desk Space is a premium free and feature rich WordPress theme.
It comes with a robust set of built in features and plugins, including the ability to switch out the background wood finish color to one you like.
Everything you see in this demo is using built in plugins.
Feature List
- Built in plugins for Twitter, Flickr, Recent Comments, Comment Editor, and Shadowbox.
- Built in google adsense strip. Just paste in your client ID in the theme options page.
- Built in feedburner linkage. Just paste in your feedburner ID in the theme options page.
- Comments and Trackbacks are seperated. (example)
- Gravatar support.
- Widget ready.
- Background image wood finish color choice. See screenshots below.
- jQuery fancy pants effects like smooth scrolling
- Page template that includes comments.
- Attractive Printed Pages via print.css
- Sidebar profile with info that is pulled from the admin user account like the gravatar.
- IE6 compatible.
Background options
Theme Options & and Printed page
Nods, Props, Credits Etc
The home page idea of older posts fading and shrinking was entirely influenced by Darren Hoyt’s Agregado Theme.
The background images are courtesy of Wolfgang Bartelme’s Solid Wood Devkit.
We love WordPress. But not in “that” kind of way.
The comment box editor is a built in WMD Editor plugin by Chad Coleman. Removed in Version 1.5
Shadowbox is also built in. Just add rel=”shadowbox” to any link tag. You can find more tricks on usage at the shadowbox site.
Download Desk Space
Theme Options Page Requires Saving For Theme To Work After Installation!
Due to so many comments coming in about the theme “not working” or “not showing posts”, I must make this a rather large note. After uploading and activating the theme, you must go to the sidebar in your admin center and click APPEARANCE > DESKSPACE OPTIONS and hit the save button. This writes the data to the database and presents the theme with your chosen options.
Release Notes
Version 1.0
It launches. After one day, we received some constructive criticism via our twitter friends.
- “It sucks. Start over”. We’ll have to take that one with a grain of salt.
- “The background fading to white is a bit too stark.” So we figured we’ll update the file with a fixed background image. Which brings us to version 1.1 now available for download.
Version 1.1
Applied a “fixed” background image. Let us know what you think.
Added max-width restriction to images used in posts.
Updated archive.php to inform the viewer what date, tag, or category they are viewing.
Version 1.5 June 16th, 2009
- Advanced Theme Settings Page
- New Front Page Layout Control: Default, Page or Blog Posts
- Page Navigation Tabs
- Threaded Comments
- Bug Fix Jan. 7th 2010 – We corrected the page inclusion in the theme options for the themes navigation.
Good job, really clean design.
Thanks for checking it out Curtis.
Simple & clean. Really good job.
Not only simple and clean – very cool. I love wood!
cool theme. Blue and wood are all my favorite.
Wow, really nice! I think i used it for another Porjekt. Good Work!
I downloaded the theme and installed in on my blog, but now I’m having trouble with my profile avatar. I recieve the following error on my page when I view my blog.
Any suggestions on whats going on?
DavidR
Great job, its beautiful
Nice theme!
Hi David, Have you modified the sidebar.php theme file at all? Please make sure that the email address in your user profile is the same thats associated with your gravatar account. I also am noticing in your pasted in error code, that get_gavatar is missing a r in gravatar. Is that right?
The author info is based on the author of the very first post. Do you have multiple authors on your site?
Very nice!!
I couldn’t get to work at all on my self-hosted wordpress all I get is a blank page and then I have to go in and delete the theme in order to have access to my admin page again. Could this be caused by a plugin I’m using or what? I wanted to try this theme it’s really beautiful. Any ideas? Thanx.
@Divageekdesigns
My suggestion would be to deactivate all your plugins, activate the theme, then follow the theme installation instructions at the bottom of the theme options page. Then go back in and activate one plugin at a time, to find which one is breaking the theme.
Once we know what plugin is causing the issue, we’ll be able to give you a better idea of how to fix it.
I like your theme man. It’s so elegant and fresh. Thanks for share it free and keep the good work
Great lookin’ theme, JJ. Excellent work. Just voted for you in the contest mentioned above.
I’ve installed and begun messing around at my site (linked), I think it could be a great fit for me as I ramp up and write more.
Couple of quick issues:
Am I missing an ‘excerpt’ setting somewhere with respect to the home page most recent posts? After the fresh install it only shows a brief excerpt of the post on the front page, with no “more” or “read the rest” link option, and I’m not using excerpts in the posts themselves.
My nav buttons appear dead, and after digging around the code for an hour or so, I’m no closer to understanding why.
I’ve learned from experience that it’s easy to miss things that later seem extremely obvious, and I’m sure that’s the case here on at least one of these issues. I appreciate any help pointing out that fact.
Thanks kindly.
Hi Dave,
In the theme file home.php, around line 24, you’ll want to find this line:
<?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote>', 'content', FALSE, 'more »', FALSE, 2); ?>
and change it to this:
<?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote>', 'content', TRUE, 'more »', FALSE, 2); ?>
You can also modify the “more »” to whatever you’d like the text to read.
And as for why the nav buttons are not working, I am unable to figure out. All the JS files are being called, and the includes are all uploaded and working correctly. My one and only guess is that its due to the Godaddy hosting. I’ve had strange and unanswerable issues like this with them in the past. I’d suggest going with a hosting company like Dreamhost.
You can try asking Godaddy support for any help, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I love this theme, but i cannot get my adsense working at all. i have the correct pub id
Hi JJ…and thank you.
I’m excited to discover that…GoDaddy potentially sucks! I’ve been running web services for major organizations and of course I decide to give GoDaddy a try on my own personal site. Way to play the odds, Dave! I cannot claim ignorance.
I’ll keep hacking away and see what I come up with. If and when I get serious about my own site I may change hosts, we’ll see.
Thanks again,
DJ
I really like this theme, but can u explain to me why is the Adsense module on the template not working for me? everything else is prefect.
good job thanks
Awesome WordPress Theme, very clean and professionell design, thumbs up for your design skillings.
Will use the Theme for my new Project
Thank you for a lovely theme. I am using it. I could however not get flickr to work so I am using another flickr plugin.
does anyone know how to add adsense to this template?
The trouble for the Adsense come from the param “google_ad_slot =” which appear in the files of the theme.
You have to create an ad in the google adsense interface (I think that you have to chose a banner 468×15) and paste the ad_slot param int the theme files.
JJ, which color and ad format do you recommand ?
Will you add the ad_slot param in a next release of your very nice theme ?
Hi Zawadi,
In your WP admin center, click on Design > Desk Space Theme Options.
From there, you will be able to add your Google Adsense Client ID into the designated field. Once its in, hit Save Options, and the links will appear on your home page.
To find your client ID, you can look at the javascript code that Google gives you, and its starts with “pub-” and a string of numbers follows.
Hope this helps.
@libretto – That’s a good call. We’ll see about getting that set up for the next version.
Currently, it is using a ad_slot design that is already pre-designed. We’ll open it up to allow you to choose your own style of ad.
Very nice theme, thanks, I used it in my blog, My blog is in Chinese, so I made some customization.
Great! but the pages button don’t work. Why?
Hey JJ!
Great design! I have already installed it on my website as my personal blog! Doesn’t get much better then this. One question though. I would like to keep the pages links on the screen all the time. How do I go about changing that?
Hi Jim,
By “keep the pages links on the screen all the time”, do you mean to remove the other buttons? And only have pages listed?
Or do you mean to have the pages listed by default on the page load?
I was referring to having the pages listed by Default.
I think we actually tried to accomplish that originally, and the ajax dom-loading was giving us some beef. I’ll have the programmer attempt to accomplish it once more. Stay tuned.
Great theme!
I’m actually trying to setup a theme for my brother’s site (mostly videos) and on the main page you can’t see the videos, any idea why?
http://trubruproductions.com/
Hi Robin,
The theme was built to have as less clutter on the home page, so we actually used a custom content call from the plugin “excerpt reloaded”. You can try one of two things.
Swap this:
<?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote>', 'content', FALSE, 'more »', FALSE, 2); ?>
with this:
<?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote><embed><object><param>', 'content', FALSE, 'more »', FALSE, 2); ?>
If that fails to work, then you can go with removing the excerpt tag, and using the default content tag.
Swap line 24 in home.php with this
<?php the_content('<p class="serif">Read more »</p>'); ?>
woah. that code got messed. don’t use that.
WMD Editor is letting me down. Lemme try again.
Ok I tried both and as you can see I got an error: http://trubruproductions.com
oops sorry.
You’re so fast! I was actually playin with my syntax plugin… and I didn’t realize you were grabbin the code. Try it again now.
Hi,
This is my first WP blog and I found the Desk Space and thought it perfect for a blog. I love all the built in plugins and widgets. The design is so clean useful!
I am having lots of “user” problems. My problems are me. I promise not to complain about the theme.
Deskspace Theme
1. The first 4 buttons on the top left, I cannot get to function. This is the group that includes the RSS red button.
2. I cannot get my Adsense to work. I had them working momentarily, but they were the long 728X90 and they were on the side bar and did not fit. I change html code in the Adsense manager and now I get nothing. I tried deleting the code and running a new ad. Am I supposed to go to my adsense account and paste the code?
3, Cannot get the red RSS feed button in the upper left to work. Here is my error “Warning: require(../../../../wp-blog-header.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home7/markkeel/public_html/wp-content/themes/deskspace/deskspace/includes/subscribe.php on line 1
Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘../../../../wp-blog-header.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home7/markkeel/public_html/wp-content/themes/deskspace/deskspace/includes/subscribe.php on line 1″
4. On my static page(s), can I eliminate my profile and sidebar?
Hi Mark,
I believe the twitter tools plugin is whats causing the problem for 1 and 3. Its calling the jquery library a second time.
I couldn’t tell you what the problem is with 2. And 4 is possible, but it’ll take some coding. If you’re interested in having us do it, it’ll probably take an hour.
Is there a way to customize so that tabs with the pages appear at the top of the blog?
Hi Whitney,
Where there’s a will, there’s a way! To clarify, are you seeking to display the list of pages in a tab format, across the top of the site?
Yes, I would like to have the pages listed in tabbed format across the top of the page. Ideally, some of the pages are nested, so it would be great if the nested pages had a dropdown menu for the nested pages.
You’ll want to open header.php in the theme directory, and add this code to wherever you’d like the pages to appear.
<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
</div>
Next you’ll want to style that with CSS. I suggest googling around for some prebuilt options. Here’s an option, and another.
JJ:
When I add your snipped of code, it breaks everything. I haven’t added the CSS yet, will that fix it?
JJ:
I’m getting closer! I finally figured out how to not “break” the code and get the tabs in. However, the problem I’m having is figuring out where to insert the HTML code so that the tabs sit right under the subtitle of the blog.
Here’s the link to my page… can you help?
http://whitneyclaire.com/blog/
Hi JJ,
DeskSpace issues.
I have the adsense working. Thanks! Still minor issues listed below with the RSS, Search, comment buttons.
I took out the twitter tools and the 4 buttons on the top still do not work. Would you suggest I delete the theme from my host and upload again?
The Deskspace is still my favorite theme. What is your per hour charge for coding?
Thanks!
Mark
I
Hi Mark,
I believe I have found your problem. Do you by chance happen to have 2 directories named “deskspace”?
The directory structure should be wp-content/themes/deskspace/
and appears that you may have wp-content/themes/deskspace/deskspace/
JJ,
I fixed the Deskspace problem of having 2 directories named “deskspace”. I still cannot get the Feedburner RSS working. It keeps giving an error that the url does not exist.
Mark
Hi JJ,
I have the Deskspace theme nearly working. I get this error “Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/2878966?format=xml
HTTP Error (Code) and Message: (404) Feed not found error: FeedBurner cannot locate this feed URI.”
I did delete the second directory as you suggest in your last comments.
Thanks,
Mark
Thanks for this theme! I love it
Love the new theme and thinking of using it for my blog redesign. How difficult is it to customize a few simple things?
I need to add a centered box at the bottom for additional widgets, etc. that fits with the theme and have the links show up when you mouse over the 4 buttons at the top right instead of only when you click them?
Hi Tyler, If you’re not familiar with xHTML, CSS, PHP and WordPress, the process can be difficult. Please let us know if you’re interested in our services. We can modify the theme to suit your needs.
Hey ! Great job, I love your theme and I’ve adopted it for my own blog, but there’s only one thing that annoy me : smooth scrolling …
Would you said me how erase it please ?
Have a good day !
hi, thanks for this great theme.
I’ve just one problem : when i want to add a widget, the flickrss photos disappear on the sidebar…
2 questions:
1) On the main page, my post appears with no styling; for example, if I have a numbered list, or have changed the style of the font for a particular area, these changes don’t show up. Why not?
2) I’d like to have my paragraphs formatted in “block” styling with no indent. Where would I look in the css documents to change this?
Hi Whitney,
1) Particular styles were removed because they would get cut off in the middle, and cause HTML problems. If you would still rather have them, you can edit home.php. Anywhere in that template file that you see the_excerpt_reloaded you’ll see a list of allowed html tags to be output. add any additional tags that you’d like to appear.
2) To remove paragraph indentation, edit line 117 in style.css which is #main .mainbody
For #1 – in Deskspace 1.5 is this changed? I was going back to add the customizations that I had made in the previous version, but I can’t find this line item anywhere.
I’m getting reports that Deskspace isn’t working on IE 8!! Eek! Does anyone know about this?
We’re planning on releasing an updated version of the Deskspace Theme. It will support all of the WP 2.7 features and more. We’ll also check it against IE8.
I love your theme. What changes do I have to make to make an entire post show on the home page?
Any projected release date for the new Desk Space version?
The new Desk Space theme is up! Check out the demo for some of the minor design mods. The theme settings page now gives you much more control over your front page and sidebar.
Hi JJ,
Just downloaded Deskspace 1.5. When I activate it, it gives me a white page o’death. I’m using WP SVN (currently 2.9-rare). Other 2.8-compliant themes seem to be running fine. Any ideas?
Thanks for your time.
Hi Cena,
I would suggest disabling plugins one at a time, and see if that resolves the problem. The demo theme is currently hosted on a 2.8 install, so I know that it can’t be the problem.
Disabling all plugins (only had a few activated) doesn’t help.
An odd element of this is that Deskspace 1.1 runs fine on 2.9.
Thank you for the theme. Quick question. How do I get the profile information on the sidebar to recognize carriage returns? At this time it is taking multiple paragraphs and running them together into one. I cannot seem to enter html into the wordpress biographical info field to do it myself.
Hi Ron, I’m honestly not sure how to go about that one. You might want to ask on the WP Forums. Please let us know if you find a solution.
Hi JJ,
I am loving the option to use Shadowbox with the Gallery but I’m having a problem with my thumbnail images stacking on top of each other. Is there a quick fix to get them to go into pretty rows of three like your demo?
Thanks!
Hi Meredith,
Looking at your site that is linked in your name, I do not see where the thumbnails are stacking on top of each other. Are you referring to your portfolio page? or the flickr thumbnails in the sidebar? What browser are you using?
Oh I actually figured it out myself… it was on my portfolio page. Thanks for the response though!!
I have loaded this theme,not touched anything on it, but do have 2 posts to test, and I do not see it come up on the ‘home’ tab. Am I missing something?
It doesnt seem to work in Chrome =(
If you’ve loaded the theme and it appears funky, be sure that you’ve followed the directions in the README.TXT file included with the theme.
You need to go to Appearance > Theme Options and save it, so that it writes the info to the database.
I just noticed that the “Read More” links on the front page are gone…. help with restoring them please!
Love the layout and the features, I just can’t get the RSS feed to work. FeedBurner gives this message every time I tr5y to burn/validate the feed:
Sorry
This feed does not validate.
line 1, column 0: Undefined root element: script [help]
line 5, column 0: XML parsing error: :5:0: junk after document element [help]
I have put my FeedBurner ID into the theme settings in the WorPress dashboard, but am stuck.
Any help at all would be great.
thanks,
—RJ
Hi RJ
It appears that you have put your email address as your feed name. Try putting the actual feed name. For example, here is a comparison of our feed with yours.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DirtyBlue?format=xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/youremail@yahoo.com?format=xml
Nathaniel,
Thanks for taking a look, and I’m sorry for being so thick, but I am not sure what other account name I have. FeedBurner asked me to make a Google account with my current email (rjpooch@yahoo.com) is there something I’m missing?
Thanks again.
—RJ
After a little more looking into what the feed name is (apparently not what I sign into FeedBurner with) I guess I need to clarify the problem.
I cannot burn the feed to begin with, initial message is:
The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 5: The markup in the document following the root element must be well-formed.
and then the validation message I posted before. In the index.php file of the theme line 5 is:
I didn’t want to ruin anything by messing with the coding, because as I said, ither than this problem, I love the theme.
thanks again for taking the time to look.
Gorgeous theme.
However, I’m having the same problem – posts don’t appear on home page.
I’ve previewed them within the editor and they look correct on that preview/sample page. However, when I view my site the posts are not there.
Also, activated content via the widgets won’t show up either in the sidebar (eg. additional text).
I’d be grateful for any help as I’d like to see this theme go the distance – it’s really quite attractive and appears to have nice features.
WOW you guys are patient. Great job with this theme and thank you for providing it so generously. I have only run up against one issue- double trouble on my profile data. In the sidebar, the “My name is” content displays twice. I have found the code in sidebar.php but I do not see where it would create duplicity in the profile data (like it is).
My name is
Thanks for any insight you can provide.
Hey I fixed my profile duplicity issue by deleting my first post! I feel so smug!
Thanks again for the amazing theme….
C
For those who have recently downloaded the theme, we have just found a bug in the header.php that has to do with the options page and listing the pages you want to show up in the navigation.
Open header.php and on line 56 change
get_option(‘beauregard_menu_pages’);
to
get_option(‘deskspace_menu_pages’);
The top-corner photo… is that pulled from Gravatar or our Wodpress admin account profile?
What is the mechanism to turn that on? Not sure about past versions (as I’ve never looked) but I’m not seeing a photo-upload feature or anything that might let me get a profile to show up. I have a gravatar account but I’m a new user. If it’s pulled from our admin WP bio do we need to add html to reference the pic?
Thanks for all the help!
Hi Dan, There are instructions that are at the bottom of the Theme Options page.
6) Your Profile! Be sure to go to your profile, and add a first and last name, an email that has gravatar support, and a short description about yourself. It will all be reflected in the sidebar profile.
I’m just converting my old website to a new blog using your beautiful theme. I’m having one problem: I can’t access the Flickr thingy to change the size of the imported images. I originally uploaded the 1.1 version, and there I could change the sizes easily. Now I have uploaded the 1.5 version of Desk Space (love that you added the tabs for the different pages on top!) but I can’t get access on either link provided in the Desk Space Settings page. The top one, under general settings, I just get a blank page. The bottom link under Instructions says I don’t have permission to access that page. Help? I want the pictures smaller so the Twitter feed shows up better. Also, is there a way to remove the “Recent comments” widget? Would rather not have that.
Thank you!
Hi Nancy,
1) Access the flickr settings under “Settings > FlickrRSS”
2) I’m not sure why the Deskspace Settings Page isn’t showing for you. You may want to reupload all of the theme files, to be sure that one didn’t fail to upload.
3) Hmm.. That’s actually the first request we’ve had for removing recent comments. And come to think of it, there isn’t an easy switch to turn them off. You’d have to edit sidebar.php and remove the code that calls it.
Hi!
Two things.
1. Is there a way to have a “next page” or “older posts” button on the bottom of the page? I can’t figure out a way for visitors to easily access older content without putting everything on one page.
2. Also, is there a way to banner a photo behind the text title of the blog.
I like your theme very much and any help is appreciated.
Hi there!
even though the design is not quite my taste, this theme is a really fine piece of coding, e.g. all js in the footer. You should really add this and your proposal concerning the htaccess file to your feature list.
Thanks for sharing
Michael
My admin user bio appears twice in sidebar, although it does not appear twice in the sidebar code. It just happened one day and I don’t recall what I was doing when it happened. Any help?
I realized what happened. If I make a post sticky, it doubles the admin data in the sidebar. How can I fix this?
There’s a handful of plugins I’ve been attempting to use that don’t seem to be working. A lot of people tell me,
“make sure ” is placed in the footer.php. It is, and people don’t believe me (for the reason some plugins don’t work.
So, is really in the footer.php or am I just going through other issues?
How to delete the duplicity of my profile data showing up? I realized that is shows whenever I stickey a post, how do I fix this? Thanks Loooooove the theme
Great design! Very neat and clean. Just perfect.
I have an problem: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /users/xxxt/www/wp/wp-content/themes/deskspace1.5/lib/desk_functions.php on line 80 .. :/
Hi
Bravo and thank you for this theme I use on my site http://www.jeffstudio.fr, some bugs anyway
but are probably due to the French translation.
Thank you again for your excellent work!
After I install it, it says:
Parse error: parse error in C:\wamp\www\wordpress\wp-content\themes\deskspace1.5\lib\desk_functions.php on line 50
Anyone knows what to do?
Wow – Great WordPress theme to see here
I can’t seem to get the theme to show the hover-over sub-pages list. I’ve tested on Mac FF and Safari as well as my XP machine IE8. On the Twenty Eleven default them the top tabs successfully let sub-pages roll down when hovering over the tab. So, I know my WP and setup are correct.
Is there a workaround to get DeskSpace to show sub-pages?
Thanks for such an attractive, free theme!
Awesome Theme!! I have been looking for a simple theme to do my on personal site with and this fits the bill to a “t”.
Be Blessed, Doug
Glad to hear it, Doug. This theme is falling a bit behind, and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that the new WP offers.
We hope to have it updated soon.
I’ve been using this theme for years ad still love it!
I am however having trouble finding where to add coding to enable the “previous posts” link at the bottom of my main page…
Any help or insight would be much appreciated. I have read the Codex documentation, but am still unsure where to put it. (http://codex.wordpress.org/Next_and_Previous_Links)
Thanks again for taking the time to look.
—RJ