This theme was released nearly a year ago, but we’ve only just got around to reviewing its Headline, Features & Categories for a new client community.

So, it may not be new, but it’s worth a few words!

Normally we think of Themes as simply how a website will look and feel – column layout, color schemes, font and style settings. Sometimes a theme provides a lot more than just style.

The Arthemia theme by OneSoft is an good example of where some additional features allow the blog owner to have Headline and Featured Items automatically placed and self-updating without any programming or HTML skills.

The following snapshot breaks down the blog into three parts:

Click the hyperlink below to read the whole of this post about the Arthemia theme.

1. Headline Article

The blog administrator can select what category of blog post will be automatically displayed as the Headline or front-page story. The Blog will automatically display the last post from the selected headline category.

Where a blog usually has a primary category, in this case “Electronic Medical Records” new posts of this category are automatically pulled into the Headline area. If this is a regular news site, it means the most important posts are always displayed front-of-house.

If a different Category of post demands Headline billing, a quick change to the Headline Category updates the Headline area with the latest other Category selected.

2. Featured Articles

The same widget above allows the selection of which Category of articles are Featured in the right-hand column. Again, a blog owner can adjust which Featured Category to display, depending upon a current news topic, customer demand or simply varying the articles displayed alongside the Headline act.

Featured Articles show a scaled image picked from within a post (provided an image exists). Optionally this could be configured to provide an extract from the articles and an image.

3. Categories

This is the really clever piece!

Generally its good practice to Categorize your posts as being about a specific subject. Visitors can then click upon a Category and see all the posts relating to that subject.

The Arthemia theme places a grid of up to five Categories under the Headline article including the description given about a Category. The snapshot below shows a mouse-over the fourth category, legislation. Clicking this category would display all posts of Category “legislation”.

Where a blog (quite reasonably) may have many more Categories, they can be excluded from the top-five Categories by placing a : (colon) into its description.

Resources

1. Additionally Antonio Chagoury's provdies his own Arthemia Pro version including support for Twitter.
2. OneSoft’s standard Arthemia theme used in the above documentation.
3. You can see the Arthemia theme in action here (new window) however running in only theme preview mode does not display the features above. See a work-in-progress demonstration here.

BlogEngine.NET, Headline BlogEngine.NET, Headline