Theme that can include category boxes on front page

[Michael Kellam]

I'm wondering if anyone can give me info about Themes. On one of our new sites, we'd like to include boxes on the front page in the main content area with article excerpts. Ideally, we'd like it if one box can have recent posts, one box could have everything from a specific category and one could randomly display posts pulled from all categories *except* specific seasonal ones.

Does Thesis do this without a lot of manual coding?

We used Studiopress in the past and it included something like this, but our overall experience with Studiopress was unpleasant and we'd like to avoid that.

As it stands, I can hack our current theme (Atahualpa) which has been great for other things, but it will probably require a lot of work to make it work properly and I'd have to be sure to modify every time we upgrade, which I'd like to avoid... Any thoughts or recommendations?

Actually, we'd be open to any plugins that might do this, too...

Michael

[ChristineCobb]

The easiest way is to have a home page that is widgetized, so you might search for that characteristic at WordPress.org or at ThemeForest.

What was it about Studiopress that was unpleasant? I use a Genesis child theme on most of my sites. Maybe I can help you get back on track with it.

[KellyMcCausey]

I'm sure you could do it with Builder (from iThemes). It's crazy flexible - but not as user friendly as Studiopress in my opinion.

I echo Christine, what's bugged you about Studiopress?

[ChristineCobb]

I ran across this plugin. It might be your answer. http://codecanyon.net/item/custom-widget-areas-for-wordpress/130941

[Michael Kellam]

Hi Christine and Kelly,

Thanks for your answers!

We might go ahead and try Studiopress again since it's a new fairly clean site that's not yet established. My negative feelings about Studiopress are just because a loss of a lot of time in the configuration when we used it before that ended up being unusable.

When we first started using it, people were telling Tawra how great it was so we implemented it. That was just before the transition from "Classic" to "Genesis" formats, which nobody at studiopress mentioned when we bought it or I would have waited the month for Genesis to come out before trying the theme. I spent a month getting it configured so it would work the way Tawra wanted it to but almost immediately after getting it working the way we wanted, they released Genesis and advised us that we would need to completely rework the theme in order to upgrade because the transition from classic to Genesis was so radical. After losing the better part of a month of productivity, I decided it wasn't worth doing all the work all over again to get it where we wanted it.

So my problem with Studiopress wasn't that the theme was necessarily bad but that I'm trying to spend as little time as possible on non income generating tasks and having lost so much time before, I was reluctant to try again. Granted, I know a lot more about modifying themes now so it might be easier. I think we're going to try it again on the clean site and see if we can shortcut the setup...

Thanks!

Michael

[Michael Kellam]

By the way, Christine - That Custom Widget Areas plugin looks great... We may end up using that on our main site. Thanks!

Michael