loading

Desk Space Wordpress Theme

Desk Space is a premium free and feature rich Wordpress theme.

Demo / Download »

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

Deskspace 1.5 Light Deskspace 1.5 Medium Deskspace 1.5 Dark

Theme Options & and Printed page

Deskspace 1.5 Settings

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

Desk Space Theme 1.5 610K

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.

  1. “It sucks. Start over”. We’ll have to take that one with a grain of salt. ;)
  2. “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

  1. Advanced Theme Settings Page
  2. New Front Page Layout Control: Default, Page or Blog Posts
  3. Page Navigation Tabs
  4. Threaded Comments
  5. Bug Fix Jan. 7th 2010 – We corrected the page inclusion in the theme options for the themes navigation.

Share and Enjoy
  • Facebook
  • Twitthis
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Design Float
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Technorati

107 Comments

  1. Curtis Reply

    Good job, really clean design.

  2. JJ Reply

    Thanks for checking it out Curtis.

  3. Pete Reply

    Simple & clean. Really good job.

  4. Brandon Cox | eGrace Creative Reply

    Not only simple and clean – very cool. I love wood!

  5. kevin Reply

    cool theme. Blue and wood are all my favorite.

  6. m.o.m. Reply

    Wow, really nice! I think i used it for another Porjekt. Good Work!

  7. David Reply

    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.

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_gavatar() in /home/a1920098/public_html/wp-content/themes/deskspace/sidebar.php on line

    Any suggestions on whats going on?

    DavidR

  8. Arnaldo Reply

    Great job, its beautiful

  9. garconcn Reply

    Nice theme!

  10. JJ Reply

    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?

  11. Danesh Reply

    Very nice!!

  12. Divageekdesigns Reply

    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. :)

  13. JJ Reply

    @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.

  14. Adieska Reply

    I like your theme man. It’s so elegant and fresh. Thanks for share it free and keep the good work :)

  15. Dave Johnston Reply

    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.

  16. JJ Reply

    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 &raquo;', FALSE, 2); ?>

    and change it to this:

    <?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote>', 'content', TRUE, 'more &raquo;', 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.

  17. zawadi Reply

    I love this theme, but i cannot get my adsense working at all. i have the correct pub id :(

  18. Dave Johnston Reply

    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

  19. zawadi Reply

    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.

  20. webdesign augsburg Reply

    good job thanks

  21. seoblackhat Reply

    Awesome Wordpress Theme, very clean and professionell design, thumbs up for your design skillings.

    Will use the Theme for my new Project ;)

  22. Munki Reply

    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.

  23. zawadi Reply

    does anyone know how to add adsense to this template?

  24. libretto Reply

    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 ?

  25. JJ Reply

    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. :)

  26. JJ Reply

    @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.

  27. Soloman Reply

    Very nice theme, thanks, I used it in my blog, My blog is in Chinese, so I made some customization.

  28. Andrei Reply

    Great! but the pages button don’t work. Why?

  29. Jim C. Reply

    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?

  30. JJ Reply

    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?

  31. Jim C. Reply

    I was referring to having the pages listed by Default.

  32. JJ Reply

    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.

  33. Robin Reply

    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/

  34. JJ Reply

    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.

    1. Add the embed call to the excerpt on line 24 of home.php.

    Swap this:


    <?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote>', 'content', FALSE, 'more &raquo;', FALSE, 2); ?>

    with this:


    <?php the_excerpt_reloaded(150, '<p><img><a><blockquote><embed><object><param>', 'content', FALSE, 'more &raquo;', 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 &raquo;</p>'); ?>

  35. JJ Reply

    woah. that code got messed. don’t use that. :| WMD Editor is letting me down. Lemme try again.

  36. Robin Reply

    Ok I tried both and as you can see I got an error: http://trubruproductions.com

  37. Robin Reply

    oops sorry.

  38. JJ Reply

    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.

  39. Mark Keeler Reply

    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?

  40. JJ Reply

    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.

  41. Whitney Reply

    Is there a way to customize so that tabs with the pages appear at the top of the blog?

    • JJ

      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?

  42. Whitney Reply

    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.

    • JJ

      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.

  43. Whitney Reply

    JJ:

    When I add your snipped of code, it breaks everything. I haven’t added the CSS yet, will that fix it?

  44. Whitney Reply

    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/

  45. Mark Keeler Reply

    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

    • JJ

      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/

  46. mark Reply

    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

  47. mark Reply

    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

  48. Stéphane Gaudreault Reply

    Thanks for this theme! I love it :)

  49. Tyler Reply

    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?

  50. JJ Reply

    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.

  51. Mealin Reply

    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 !

  52. Pierre Reply

    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…

  53. Whitney Reply

    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?

  54. JJ Reply

    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

    • Whitney

      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.

  55. Whitney Reply

    I’m getting reports that Deskspace isn’t working on IE 8!! Eek! Does anyone know about this?

    • JJ

      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.

  56. Chancy Reply

    I love your theme. What changes do I have to make to make an entire post show on the home page?

  57. Whitney Reply

    Any projected release date for the new Desk Space version?

  58. JJ Reply

    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.

    • Cena

      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.

    • Nathaniel

      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.

    • Cena

      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. :)

  59. RFS Reply

    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.

    • Nathaniel

      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.

  60. Meredith Reply

    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!

    • Nathaniel

      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?

    • Meredith

      Oh I actually figured it out myself… it was on my portfolio page. Thanks for the response though!!

  61. Jason Reply

    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?

  62. Dennis Reply

    It doesnt seem to work in Chrome =(

  63. Nathaniel Reply

    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.

  64. Whitney Reply

    I just noticed that the “Read More” links on the front page are gone…. help with restoring them please!

  65. RJ Pooch Reply

    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

  66. RJ Pooch Reply

    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

  67. RJ Pooch Reply

    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.

  68. carrie caignet Reply

    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.

  69. carrie caignet Reply

    Hey I fixed my profile duplicity issue by deleting my first post! I feel so smug!

    Thanks again for the amazing theme….
    C

  70. Nathaniel Reply

    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’);

  71. Dan Reply

    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!

    • Nathaniel

      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.

  72. Nancy Atkinson Reply

    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!

    • Nathaniel

      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.

Trackbacks

  1. John J. Honeycutt » Blog Archive » Introducing: “Desk Space” - October 1 08
  2. Desk Space — Simple Themes - October 1 08
  3. Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 | KaosKoxp Oyun Portali - October 3 08
  4. Thème WordPress Desk Space : un “premium” gratuit | WordPress tuto - October 3 08
  5. Wordpress Theme Desk Space | Art Hacker - October 3 08
  6. WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 | BlogBroker24-7 - October 3 08
  7. ithemes.org - October 3 08
  8. 11 High-Quality Wordpress themes released in September 2008 | slayer's blog - October 3 08
  9. WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 · Softonix.com - October 4 08
  10. Weblog Tools Collection: WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 | Aslifm Blog - October 6 08
  11. WordPress theme Desk Space | Smartr.cn - October 7 08
  12. ZHAN.US » WordPress Theme Desk Space - October 8 08
  13. WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 | PATRON DIGITAL.COM - October 13 08
  14. WordPress Theme Releases for 10/03 | PATRONIT.NET - October 14 08
  15. Plantilla Wordpress Gratis - Desk Space | Lobo-David - October 23 08
  16. My Top 5 Free Wordpress Themes | Blemble - December 22 08
  17. WordPress Theme of the Month: Desk Space - January 8 09
  18. WPZOOM ›› 50+ Free WordPress Themes for Personal Blogs of High Quality - January 30 09
  19. Temas de Calidad para Wordpress / Tumblr | arturogoga - March 3 09
  20. Desktop themes for Wordpress - May 6 09
  21. 13 Magnificent Free Wordpress Portfolio Themes | Css Reflex - Design Blog | Web Design | Inspiration and Resources for Designers - September 19 09

Leave a Reply