Theme framework highlights

Our theme framework includes a basic starter theme as well as three child themes that demonstrate the design flexibility of the platform. The functionality and design of these production-ready themes can be customized to suit your needs or used out of the box. All of the themes share these features:

Navigation

Mega menus

Global navigation within the theme has been designed to aid users in the discovery of timely and relevant content. For example, the main category dropdown navigation goes beyond revealing the subsections of a category to surface recent articles and related topics. Not only does this approach give users a better sense of what to expect from a category, but the larger screen real estate afforded to the menu avoids the usability issues associated with the small hit areas of tradition drop-down navigation.

Don't miss menu

Below the main navigation, a custom menu titled 'Don't Miss' provides bloggers with a region high on the page to surface links to topics that are of the moment.

Custom taxonomies for features and series

In addition to tag- and category-based navigation, custom taxonomies have been added to the framework to help you highlight and organize your most compelling work.

Greatest Hits

The framework also features an optional sidebar menu that you can use to showcase your enduring posts or a collection of featured posts from the past that you feel are must-reads.

Content Promotion

Skybox

Not all content is equal. To highlight the most important posts on your blog, The Argo Theme Framework reserves spots in the site-wide header and footer for featured content. By adding content to a regions typically reserved for branding and navigation, you're sending a signal that content is your brand and that these important page regions are a place to return to time and again to discover something new.

Sticky Posts

The main content areas of the Argo theme framework have been optimized for visual variety and currency. Outside of these goals, there are times when you need to keep a post or series at the top of the home page while other posts are being published. We've customized WordPress' sticky post functionality to not only add visual emphasis, but to also show related posts if your sticky post is part of a series.

Page types and post formats

Custom category and tag pages

The framework provides bloggers with custom category and tag pages that feature a spot at the top of the page for key background information, and a dynamically generated list of related topics.

Author Archives

Each blog author gets an individual archive page indexing all of the author's posts. At the top of this archive, an author can optionally add a short bio. In addition to this functionality, the framework makes a distinction between primary and guest authors. If a non-primary author has provided a bio, that bio will appear at the bottom of their posts, helping to distinguish guests' posts from those of the primary blogger(s).

Post formatting

The design of posts and regions should be an expression of the content they contain. With that in mind, the Argo theme framework bakes many post formatting options right into the theme. From Pull Quotes and asides to Q&As and comment roundups, the post formatting options available to you go far beyond expected formatting of baseline markup.

Social media

The Argo theme framework was designed to work alongside popular social media platforms, allowing you to integrate Twitter and Facebook sharing tools directly into posts and manage a customizable list of your social media profiles in the header and footer of your site.

In addition to integration with Twitter and Facebook, the framework has been built for use with distributed commenting platforms such as Disqus or IntenseDebate

Admin settings and theme configuration

Once you've installed the framework, you'll find a number of conveniences have been put in place for you within the admin area. For example, upon activation of the theme, default taxonomies and pages tied to navigation regions are automatically added to your site. When writing a post, you'll find the formatting of the post content approximates that of the published content giving you a realistic sense of text size, line lengths and how content will flow in the published post.

Technology

Under the hood, the Argo theme framework boasts templates designed for speed and performance. Utilizing Modernizr, best practices from HTML5 Boilerplate and the 960 grid system, the framework is nicely future-proof and cross-browser compatible.