OK, so I’ve decided perhaps it’s time I give my blog’s look a refresh. I looked around and found this WordPress theme called Frantic on WordPress theme website: https://wordpress.org/themes/frantic/. It had the right look I was after but was missing one tiny thing — a “footer sidebar”.

Previously I was using the Intrepidity WordPress theme and it had these nice sidebars in the footer where I had a few things set up (popular posts, archives etc):

(See also my previous post about the changes I’ve made to the Intrepidity theme and put them on Github: /2014/04/11/new-blog-layout-and-new-intrepidity-theme-changes/)

So I was trying to achieve the same with my new theme — sadly, as I said, the Frantic theme didn’t have a footer … so I decided to make one for it!

The Frantic theme hasn’t been updated in over 2 years — as you probably noticed the prompt on the WordPress Theme Gallery site. As such I couldn’t find anywhere the original source code repository so I set up a new on on GitHub and you can find it here: https://github.com/liviutudor/frantic . I started with the sources downloaded from the WordPress Theme Gallery then created a pull request (see this: https://github.com/liviutudor/frantic/pull/1) which I merged back into the master branch after making the changes.

If you look at the changes made you will notice I’ve only introduced 3 sidebars, all located in the bottom in the footer section:

• footer_left
• footer_middle
• footer_right

I’ve also copied the banner from the top and flipped it vertically so it gives a nice “closing” to the page and makes it a bit more … symmetrical for no better term. Then I just switched the theme to the new one and voila — the result is what you’re looking at right now.

NOTE ABOUT LICENSING

I am not sure what the licensing model was originally for the Frantic theme — since I got this free on the WordPress Theme Gallery section I am assuming it is free for distribution etc. I’ve made the changes available under the Apache License. However, it is possible that the original license was different in which case this might not be correct. I would appreciate if someone could clarify this for me — until then I would guess the message here is that it is unclear where this stands and there is an element of risk in using this. As and when I find out more I will post an update here. Please drop me a line if you can shed some light into this!