DarkZen WordPress Theme Released

Most of our previous WordPress themes used light or vivid colors, so I thought that a darker design was needed on the portfolio. DarkZen comes with a dark header and a gray background, packed on a clean and minimalist design.

darkzen wordpress theme

Here is a complete list of the features of the theme:

Advertising Ready: The theme comes with a 468×60 banner spot on the header, as well as six 125×125 ad blocks on the sidebar. The blogger should also be able to insert other AdSense units without problems.
Widget Ready: The theme supports widgets. Just drop the ones you use and you are ready to go.
Social Bookmarking Icons: Both the Homepage and single post pages already come with social bookmarking icons integrated. You can also remove or add new ones at will.
Customizable Sidebar: The sidebar can hold full width and split sections, so that you can customize your fields easily.
Search Engine Optimizated: As usual the title tags and internal pages are already optimized for search engines.

If you have any suggestion or question about this theme, just drop a comment below and we will address it.

Daniel Scocco on May 28, 2008 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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87 Responses to “DarkZen WordPress Theme Released”

Hussein on May 28th, 2008 10:48 am

WOW. Great theme. It’s good that it is free cause it looks like a premium one. I personally like it. I might use it now in my other blogs
Napster on May 28th, 2008 10:56 am

Great stuff!
Marcos A.T. Silva on May 28th, 2008 10:56 am

Beautiful theme!

Can we edit it color scheme, maintaining, of course, all the credits?
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 10:58 am

@Hussein and Napster, thanks!

@Marcos, of corse.
Marcos A.T. Silva on May 28th, 2008 11:05 am

Thank you Daniel.
SATISH ACHAR on May 28th, 2008 11:09 am

Again a great work Daniel.
Really looks like premium.

But, I have a question…..

Blog posts will be variable in length…
Now is that possible to make a theme which shows some extra ads in the right side when a blog post is longer (or when there is more number of comments in comment section) and the usual things when the post is normal or small in size?

Hope my question is confusing.I am not able to express my point here.
Please ask me again, if you are not able to understand!
Farfield on May 28th, 2008 11:21 am

Wow I really like this one. It’s clean and simple. As long as it’s not loaded with ads of course

I decided to go with a darker theme for my blog too. I really like clean white designs but when I saw mine for the first time I immediately liked it very much!
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 11:24 am

@Satish, that is possible, but would require some PHP customization on your part.
MrCooker on May 28th, 2008 11:31 am

Even though the theme looks nice, I noticed two things.

1. You mention on your blog and videos that you should make the subscribe area loud and clear. But looking at the theme, all I see is a little rss icon.

2. The Social Bookmark buttons. In a Video you did recently, you told that you shouldn’t have social bookmark buttons on your front page. And looking at your new theme, it does have them.

Apart from those 2 points, I think it’s a lightweight and clear theme.
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 11:38 am

@MrCooker

1. On the video I was talking about the subscribe section below the single post page, because the blogger in question made that section almost equal to the normal body text, so it was confusing.

I like the RSS position on this theme. Most people tend to look on the header when they are trying to find it.

2. It depends on whether the user has full posts or excerpts on the homepage. On the video review the guy had excerpts, hence why having social buttons on homepage was useless.

Many people still use full posts on front page though, that is why you have the icons on the theme. If you use excerpts you can just remove it.
Michael on May 28th, 2008 11:41 am

Great looking theme, I absolutely love the header color.

You know, themes seem to be getting better and better and better, at this rate we’ll be getting custom themes for free in about 6 months!
MrCooker on May 28th, 2008 11:43 am

@Daniel

About the RSS icon. I think the non tech savvy people wouldn’t understand why’d you put a little orange icon on the to right of your screen. So that kind of bothers me. But hey, you’re the professional here

And about the bookmark icons. It makes sense, thanks for clearing that up.
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 11:52 am

@MrCooker, the aim of this theme was to be clean and subtle, that is why I opted for a small RSS icon on top of the header.

You can’t have a big subscription section on all themes, and sometimes it is not even necessary.
SATISH on May 28th, 2008 12:25 pm

Please read my comment(@ comment number 6).

@Daniel,

Will you be helping to do this when we buy your premium themes( will these kind of things come under your 30 days support ? ).
spidro on May 28th, 2008 12:34 pm

Beautiful theme gonna use it on on of my blogs
thanks
David on May 28th, 2008 1:37 pm

Excellent looking theme. I am a little new to wordpress customization so forgive me if this is rudimentary but how would one change the header to display an image rather than the title & slogan?
Elaine on May 28th, 2008 1:48 pm

Daniel,
I love the theme, but I don’t use the 6 blocks ads. (I don’t know how and for what, and hope to learn it one day). How do I remove it?
Elaine on May 28th, 2008 1:56 pm

Oops, forgot to say “Thank you”.
Dan Cole on May 28th, 2008 2:19 pm

SATISH,

Daniel is not selling premium themes. This is a free theme and so are all the others he gives away.

As for your question on comment number 6. Yes it is possible to add ads if the page grows in length, but I don’t think it has been done before and released as a WordPress Plugin. It would require some knowledge in PHP and Wordpress Codex to create.

Hope this helps.
FREE One-Way Back-Links on May 28th, 2008 2:35 pm

Your theme is very clean and professional looking!

I will have to try it out on one of my blogs.
SATISH on May 28th, 2008 2:53 pm

@Dan Cole, Please visit http://www.dailyblogtips.com/i.....ess-theme/

Anyway Thanks for your response.
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 4:38 pm

@Satish, we provide support for the premium themes, not customization.

That is, if something is not working as it should, I will help. But if you want to customize the theme that is on your own.
SATISH on May 28th, 2008 4:40 pm

oh oki..
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 4:40 pm

@David, open the header.php file, locate the part that is outputting the WordPress blog name, and substitute it with an image tag for your image.

@Elaine, open the sidebar.php and you will see clearly the 6 ad blocks. Just delete that and the header “Advertisement.”
a husband on May 28th, 2008 4:55 pm

Wow! That theme is amazing and makes me wish I was using WordPress. But for now, I still can’t beat the free hosting from Blogger.

But this theme is so cool it makes me want to!
Jummy on May 28th, 2008 6:00 pm

This theme is gorgeous, Daniel. Thanks for answering the questions so far…I’ll definitely be downloading this.

Cheers!
Marcos A.T. Silva on May 28th, 2008 6:11 pm

Hi,

Someone knows how to exclude a static page from the main menu?

I tried to change the code below, on the “header.php” file:

For:

OBS: where “X” was replaced by the page ID.

This has eliminated the page I want to elimitate, but the menu is strange now. The first link is above the others, for example.

Below is a screenshot where you can see this problem:

http://screencast.com/t/YIoUJdr7

Thank you for all your help.
Marcos A.T. Silva on May 28th, 2008 6:14 pm

Sorry.

Complementing my above post, I tried to change:

php wp_list_pages(’title_li=’);

To:

php wp_list_pages(’exclude=258, title_li=’);

Sorry.
Daniel Scocco on May 28th, 2008 6:55 pm

@Marcos, easiest way to do this is to remove that code and add the menu links manually one by one. That way you have complete control over the links.
Marcos A.T. Silva on May 28th, 2008 6:59 pm

I understood, Daniel. Thank you very much.
Susan on May 28th, 2008 11:53 pm

Daniel, this theme looks GREAT! I’m considering changing my theme now!

One question: For the popular articles, I noticed in the php that you have to manually add the links to the “popular” articles. For this DailyBlogTips theme, did you manually add the links or use a plugin for the popular articles?

I’ve been looking for a good plugin to show popular articles. I couldn’t get Popularity Contest to work on WordPress 2.5.1 despite all the fixes found. Meanwhile, was wondering what everyone else is using to auto-generate popular articles.
Daniel Scocco on May 29th, 2008 7:48 am

@Susan, both on this theme and on Daily Blog Tips I show the popular articles manually.

I have a plugin coming that will do it automatically also though.
suresh on May 29th, 2008 8:16 am

It is simple and wonderful.
Loganathan on May 29th, 2008 9:05 am

Can I use this theme for my private blogs(other than word press).

In such case what type of modification needs to be done.
Daniel Scocco on May 29th, 2008 9:53 am

@Loganathan, what do you mean by private blogs? What CMS do they use?
Tom - StandOutBlogger.com on May 29th, 2008 9:59 am

I am definately giving this one a go on my new blogging project!
Muscle Post on May 29th, 2008 10:01 am

This theme is great!

Can you tell me how to add an RSS Via Email button to the header next to the RSS feed button? I tried and the formatting gets messed up. I’d really like to put it up there because it is the logical place for it and it will get the most attention.

Thanks!
Daniel Scocco on May 30th, 2008 12:16 pm

@Muscle Post, try to copy the same style as the RSS one, and just change the icon with an image of your own (an email letter or something).
Chuck Anthony on May 30th, 2008 8:09 pm

Looks great, Daniel. I’m about to take one of my blogs over to WP hosted on my own domain and was checking out some of your other themes as well. Although my Wordpress prowess leaves a lot to be desired, I’ll be giving it a try.
Secret Affiliate Code on June 1st, 2008 10:02 pm

This is one hell of a free (premium) template. Absolutely stunning
Dmitriy Donchenko on June 2nd, 2008 5:39 am

Hi, Daniel

Just finished work on translating this template for the Russian language, great thanks for the excellent template.
Marcos A.T. Silva on June 3rd, 2008 1:03 pm

Hello!

Someone knows what could be the cause of this “blank space” in the footer, when the theme is viewed on 800×600 screen resolution?

Below is a screenshot of this problem, that occurs only on 800×600 screen resolutions:

http://screencast.com/t/vnrEFxjhR

Thank you very much.
John on June 4th, 2008 9:00 pm

Beautiful theme, and great to see you give such quality work away for free. However, I think you might have a bug in the search.php.

If you type in a search that doesn’t exist on the blog, you get this error:

No such file or directory in /home/dailyblo/public_html/demos/wp-content/themes/DarkZen/search.php on line 36

I would love to use this theme on my blog, but being a wp newbie, I am not quite sure how to fix the problem. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks the theme!
autworld on June 11th, 2008 8:11 pm

great theme!
Loganathan on June 12th, 2008 6:57 am

I am happy to say this, i have created my blog using DarkZen. And its looking good. I yet to implement many.
Hammad on June 15th, 2008 9:45 am

awesome theme mate
downloading rite now…..
good job
willy on June 15th, 2008 4:03 pm

cool, i like it. i will use it in my second blog. hope to see your new design.
Robert Barr on June 16th, 2008 4:42 pm

1st of all, great theme! Really nice lines. I wanted to know where to add a feedburner feed for the RSS button at the top right? I see in the header the code for the wp version, but I don’t know which to replace, the 2.5, the atom, or the 2?

Where exactly do you put the code to work with that button?

Thanks!
Robert Barr on June 16th, 2008 4:44 pm

Also, the links and the comments are very light, where would you change these?
Robert Barr on June 16th, 2008 6:11 pm

One last thing I promise the Subfooter left/center/right, no matter what I put in there it does not appear. I am assuming it is a fat footer but I can’t seem to activate it.
My Blog Posts on June 17th, 2008 7:51 am

Dear Daniel

I like DZ theme very much. I used couple of your themes earlier and find them very nice.

Now I want to use this DZ.

There is only one problem.

I have more than 800 posts. Almost all posts have bold text in between. Also there are lot of links

When I use DZ with it, the text is not visible for the bold text as well as for the linked text.

I think that is probably the intention. But a favour for me please, just tell me how to change the same in the stylesheet or wherever and I can use it

Thanks in advance
Daniel Scocco on June 17th, 2008 8:08 am

@Robert, the code for the RSS goes in the header.php, the color for the comments you find in style.css.

@My Blog Posts, I never saw a similar problem . The theme is not supposed to remove any bold text, so I am not sure what is the issue.
My Blog Posts on June 17th, 2008 9:27 am

Dear Daniel

Thanks for replying so quickly.

The problem I am talking is this.

See your demo site in dz theme

There are no hyperlinks or any bold text so this effect is not there but if you see the posts titled Lets talk about Internet marketing, then you see the hyperlink for “global audience” is very light.

This is what I want to remove in my blog since my posts contain lot of links and bold text.

So if you just tell me to make the hyperlinks and bold text same as regular font, I will make the changes and be very very happy to use it.

Maybe the problem I am stating is by design. but please solve it for me.
Robert Barr on June 17th, 2008 11:20 am

Daniel,

I think My Blog Posts and I still have the same question, which is how do we make the hyperlinks more pronounced. They are very muted and do not stand out.
Robert Barr on June 20th, 2008 5:40 pm

Can anyone tell me what the subfooter does? I have code in each widget, but I don’t see anything. Is it supposed to be a fat footer?? Anyone?? Anyone?
Robert Barr on June 23rd, 2008 4:02 pm

DOES ANYONE STOP BY HERE TO VIEW COMMENTS ANYMORE???
KLL on July 3rd, 2008 2:57 am

i thought i had already posted this question but perhaps it didn’t go through. the live demo has 9 xhtml errors which you can see by clicking on the xhtml button on the theme. have these been corrected in a later version??

thanks.
Lars Behrenroth on July 9th, 2008 11:15 am

Hi there Daniel,

I like the theme and that’s why my wife and I chose it for her blog. I have only two questions ..
1. when attempting to subscribe to the rss feed the first page I see in Firefox3 on a mac is not showing any of the images from the blog posts or any of the formatting for that matter.
2. the same happens when clicking on the different categories. No formatting and no images are shown.

Is there a particular reason for this or better.. is there a solution to change this?

looking forward to hearing from you.

thank you ..
lars behrenroth
Daniel Scocco on July 9th, 2008 5:09 pm

@Robert Barr,

for making the links more visible, you could make them bold or underlined. You can do this on the CSS, finding the “a” classes.

We also removed the footer because it was causing some design bugs, that is why you don-t see it.

@KLL, those are minor stuff, but I will take a look to correct them, thanks.

@Lars, that is a problem on the RSS feed and not necessarily on the theme I think. Try using another theme to see if solves the problem, that way you can isolate the origin of it.
Lars Behrenroth on July 9th, 2008 9:57 pm

thanks for the quick reply, Daniel ..
I tried others and the same happens .. strange .. in Safari it’s all dandy ..

for some reason the issues w/ the categories not displaying images has disappeared after I finally went to sleep for 6hours .. hahahha ..

dope theme .. we customized a bit and once my wife created a new header it’s as good as it gets (for now at least ..
blacksnoopy on July 17th, 2008 7:46 pm

I think that it will be cooler if there is one sidebar left and one sidebar - right
And in the middle - content.
suwaiz on July 22nd, 2008 6:48 am

if you type in a search that doesn’t exist on the blog, you get this error:

No such file or directory in /home/dailyblo/public_html/demos/wp-content/themes/DarkZen/search.php on line 36

to correct this

open the > wp-content\themes\DarkZen Folder

create an empty anyname.php file

open search.php in wp-content\themes\DarkZen folder

go to line 36 that say

replace the it with

Done.

Note: if you want you can type anything to show in the anyname.php file to show if the search does not returned anything
suwaiz on July 22nd, 2008 6:50 am

if you type in a search that doesn’t exist on the blog, you get this error:

No such file or directory in /home/dailyblo/public_html/demos/wp-content/themes/DarkZen/search.php on line 36

to correct this

open the > wp-content\themes\DarkZen Folder

create an empty anyname.php file

open search.php in wp-content\themes\DarkZen folder

go to line 36 that say

php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/searchform.php’); ?

replace the it with

php include (anyname.php’);

Done.

Note: if you want you can type anything to show in the anyname.php file to show if the search does not returned anything
yofre on July 30th, 2008 8:43 pm

esta interesante este theme pero tengo un problema
como pongo un anuncio de adsense en la parte advertise here como modifico el sidebar para que me salga en anuncio
MacTeP on August 16th, 2008 5:45 pm

Very nice theme I will use it.
Thanks a lot!