Textpattern Gaia

Introduction

Gaia is a free template for Textpattern, brought to you by Vladimir Agafonkin, a front-end developer from Kiev, Ukraine. It is designed for blog-like websites, but can easily be adapted for a different use.

The concept behind the design is a clear focus on content and simplicity beside beauty and elegance.

“Less is more”

It doesn't give any means for displaying hundreds of links, widgets, buttons and other flashy stuff out of the box. In a wish to provide reader with as many information and functionality as possible, we often forget about the importance of the main content. As a result, most of the websites we see in the Web today are too crowded and cluttered to be read with comfort while maintaning the focus on what's really important.

If you want to deliver and communicate with the reader through your writing and not rely on overwhelming him with “stuff” to make an impression, this is a right template for you.

Short outline of Gaia features

From the users perspective

  • Flexible and elegant design that looks beautiful on any resolution (and with any font size)
  • Rich formatting of content, designed on a subtle grid
  • Content-focused, no redundant functionality
  • Thoroughly tested and works great in myriads of browsers. Among them: FF 2, IE 5/5.5/6, Safari 2/3b, Opera 9 and even Opera Mini 4b

From the developers perspective

  • Carefully crafted code architecture
    • All pages have valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS code
    • Unobtrusive JS for minor decorations (degrades gracefully)
  • Provides great deal of customization out of the box
    • Separation of type/layout (base of the template) and color/decoration styles (theme) in CSS
    • Vector graphics provided in the distribution
  • Microformats everywhere
    • hAtom feeds for article list and comments
    • hCard for article/comment authors
    • abbr datetime pattern
    • rel-bookmark, rel-tag (thanks TXP)

Proceed to the installation instructions »