Update – Jan 13 2015
– WordPress v 4.1 ready
Warning: Buyers who want to update to v 1.7 or later from an older version please refer to the documentation before updating.
About
“theDawn” is a powerful all-in-one premium WordPress theme that brings to the table many front-end and back-end features. While working on it, I’ve been paying attention to the design and structure of the theme as well as the options variety and customizability and ease of use. With its 30+ layout options, 60+ built-in shortcodes, and many other features (see features list below) it will make your WordPress life easier and joyful. Since many of “theDawn” features are built-in -some of them are exclusive, it will give you more control over your site, and induces your creativity, take “Mbiz slider” as an example.
Features
- Ten Skins: dark, light, colorful and what I call “luxurious” styles.
- Powerful backend option panels: nearly 70 admin options for managing your content, site design and layout.
- Layout varieties: multiple layouts for: homepage, portfolio, blog, gallery, page, sidebar, footer, and other options. See a complete list of layout variety
- Three Sliders: Mbiz slider, Nivo slider, fixed image.
- Mbiz slider: exclusive slider that provides many features and options which are easily manageable through powerful “Slider manager”. Take a look here. You will find more explanation and tips in the documentation. Free slider background images are also included.
- Five different homepage layouts: two magazine-like layouts which are widgets based i.e easy to manage, blog, normal page which uses shortcodes. Homepage can be given an exclusive sidebar.
- Portfolio custom post type: for easy management and organization.
- Portfolio layouts and options: portfolio can be presented in one of seven different layouts, and can be featured in your homepage. It also has video support.
- Gallery templates: creating a gallery is a cinch and fun with “theDawn” gallery templates. See the demo, and check this YouTube video tutorial.
- Sidebars: add/remove as many widgetized sidebars as you want and attach them to pages, posts, or portfolio items.
- Left and right sidebars: align your sidebars either to the left or to the right, globally, or in a given page, post, or portfolio item.
- Three blog layouts: floated image, full-width image, and disabled image layouts.
- Single-post optional widgets: “ShareThis” on 10 social networks, about the author, and popular/related posts.
- Single post can split and can be protected (password protection is supported).
- Comments: nested four levels deep. Support for comments pagination and avatars.
- 10+ custom widgets: “theDawn” provides its own widgets as well as re-styled default widgets. Added widgets -for sidebar and footer are: popular posts, flickr -which supports user photos and group pool, latest tweets, contact form, contact info, social networks, google map, advertisment widget, new in v1.5
- Footer: has three areas:
- Optional big footer: widgetized and provides 9 column layouts.
- Optional sub-footer: located inside big footer, and has 2 widgetized columns.
- Standard footer: at the very bottom, and contains footer menu.
- WP 3.0 Menus: top menu which has dropdown capability to unlimited levels, and footer menu. In addition to those two, WordPress “custom menu” has been enhanced to become dropdown ready. With WordPress 3.0 menus and theDawn sidebar generator you have the ability to add any menu to any page.
- Shortcodes: over 60 shortcodes available, all are integrated with WYSIWYG editor in a neat an organized way (you will like it). Shortcodes include but not limited to: lightbox, video, typography, contact form, sitemap, price boxes, tabbed content, column layouts, and more.
- Sitemap: a shortcode which has a lot of options, it’s simple and highly customizable. See it live.
- 20 google fonts: new in version 1.5
- Working ajax contact form: with a spam protection. It’s available as a shortcode to be added in any page, and as a widget for sidebars and footers.
- Header intro: the area beneath top menu which I call “Header-intro”, it’s optional and customizable.
- Optional breadcrumbs navigation
- Lightbox: for single image, gallery, and video. It’s based on prettyPhoto. Could be implemented by shortcodes.
- Video support
- Automatic thumbnails by
timthumb WP default thumbnail feature
- Price boxes: implemented with shortcodes.
- Admin visual editor: WYSIWYG editor is re-styled so content will have similar look to the front-end page.
- Translate ready: default POT file is included in addition to French and Dutch translations, new in v1.5
- Browser compatibility: IE7-9, Firefox 3-5, Chrome, Safari, Opera.
- Cufon font replacement
- PSD files: of basic design elements are included.
- Well documented.
Server side requirements
- PHP version 5 and above.
- WordPress version 3.0 and above.
Credits
What they say
I appreciate your help. PS Love your theme. It’s the easiest theme I have ever worked with!
Dean Petersen – Bought between 10 and 49 items.
Love your theme! Really well designed and its great to see a theme that is so user friendly.
Thank you so much for such a quick reply! I really am impressed and wish more theme creators could be more like you! Please let me know when you next wordpress theme has been published!
Rudi Minelle – Bought between 10 and 49 items.
This theme is awesome . It does what it says it will do. The documentation is clear and concise. Amazingly, for the price you get far more than you could expect and it’s a “HUGE” bang for the buck.
Judy – Bought between 10 and 49 items.
Best WP Theme I have used great work. I look forward to buying more from you keep building!!
RealThemes
You are AWESOME!!!! Thank you for your quick responses. You have completely sold me on not only your template, but your service as well. I am going to refer everyone I know who is looking for a template or site to you. You rock!
Randy Dunn
THANK YOU ! I just wanted to post on your profile that I sent 2 emails, with two different questions, and received very prompt (less than a day) answers. I appreciate that effort on your part. I buy several themes a month for clients and this is by far the best customer service I have seen (and it’s not even required). Excellent!
James Kastner – Bought between 50 and 99 items.
Change Log
Version 1.7.1 – April 23, 2014
- Updated, to become compatible with WordPress latest version 3.9.
- Fixed, Mbiz slider incompatibility with recent versions of IE.
Version 1.7 – January 23, 2014
- Fixed jQuery issues affecting the menus and other jQuery dependent elements.
- Replaced Timthumb (image resizing script) with WP default thumbnail feature.
- Fixed, re-built twitter widget for compliance with API v1.1.
- Added more portfolio options to control labels and slugs.
- Added options to disable/enable comments on pages & galleries globally.
- Added option to show hide thumbnails on single post.
- Updated optionTree plugin to the latest version 2.2.0
- Updated: core code is cleaned up and enhanced with replacing deprecated functions and fixing some errors
- Updated: better short code formatter.
Version 1.6.2 – November 5, 2012
- Twitter widget is updated according the twitter.com recent API update.
Version 1.6.1 – August 27, 2012
- Updated, to become compatible with OptionTree latest version 2.0.9.
- OptionTree plugin is integrated with the theme, no need to install the plugin any more.
- Fixed, Mbiz slider YouTube video overlapping the dropdown menu.
Version 1.6 – June 30, 2012
- Added, new homepage layout (Static with sidebar).
- Modified, important SEO update.
- Fixed, images not wrapping correctly around paragraph.
- Fixed, IE9 issues with image loading affecting the slider and other content.
- Fixed, security issue in slider manager.
- Added, security enhancements.
- Fixed, slider manager issue.
- Fixed, advertisement widget issue.
- Fixed, issue with featured content of the homepage.
- Fixed, header intro issue.
- Fixed, portfolio sliding-pages issue.
- Updated, some 3rd party plugins.
Version 1.5 – Aug 15, 2011
- Added, new advertisement widget.
- Added, 20 google fonts.
- Added, pause button for Mbiz slider.
- Added option, disable homepage slider.
- Added option, thumbnail links to either a large image or post article.
- Added, French and Dutch translations plus a default POT file. Thanks for Judicael Allemand and Ron van de Graaf for Fr & Nl translations respectively.
- Added, auto-load theme options.
- Added, theme update notifier.
- Fixed, thimthumb security vulnarability.
- Fixed, slider manager conflict with WP 3.2.1.
- Fixed, portfolio conflict with some plugins.
- Fixed, exclude category from latest entries widget issue.
- Fixed, contact form issue with some servers.
- Reduced incompatibility with third party plugins.
- Fixed other minor issues.
Version 1.0.2
- WP Audio player plug-in conflicting with theDawn built-in flowplayer issue is fixed.
- Sliders not working in static page issue is fixed
- Popular & related posts widget long titles issue is fixed.
- Cufon font is now compatible with IE9 RC
Version 1.0.1
- Cufon font not supporting non-English accent is fixed.
- Slider YouTube video bug is fixed.
