Welcome to xMark, a fully fluid, three column WordPress theme designed with the end user in mind. You know who you are - you bloggers who just want to get on with the business of blogging and don’t want to tinker with all the technical mumbo jumbo… Yea, you! I have done my utmost at making this theme as easy as possible. Straight out of the box, xMark will be a perfectly functional theme for you - however, xMark has numerous options and highlights available to you - check this stuff out:

• 3-column, fluid CSS layout
• A print.css files to maximize print output
• 2 sidebars, both fully widget compatible
• Admin options menu that gives you the option(s) to:
  • Display the authors name in the post byline.. or not
  • Custom date displays for the posts
  • Display the authors name in the byline on static pages…or not
  • Allow comments on static pages…or not
  • Set up ‘Asides’ for your blog
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliance
• Successful cross-browser rendering
• Currently supports the following plugins:
  • FlickrRSS
  • ShareThis
  • WordPress Sidebar Widgets
  • Related Entries
  • Clean Archives
• Includes optional coding for displaying an ad beneath the first post on the page. This site displays a 336×280 Google Adsense ad block - however, you can choose to display any type of banner ad you’d like. If you don’t want to display any ads beneath the first post - don’t worry, if you don’t add in the advertising code, nothing displays at all
• Category pages that display post excerpts with date, comment count and ‘read more’ link. Each Category page displays the name of the category you are browsing!
• Monthly archive pages that display post excerpts with date, comment count and ‘read more’ link. Each Monthly page displays the name of the month and year you are browsing in!
• Custom search results page gives a display of post titles, excerpts, date, post comment count and ‘read more’ link
• Custom 404 “Page Cannot Be Found” page
• An optional Archives page - - you can see my archives here
• An optional SiteMap page - you can see my sitemap here

A quick look at the documentation should answer any burning questions you have on installing and using this theme. xMark comes as is - free for you to use and relased under a Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.5 Licence - which basically means you are free to use and share - to copy, distribute, and display the work as long as you keep the original designer attribution in place. Ahem - that would be me.

The Credits page give an idea of some folks who indirectly helped make this happen. The Plugins page shows the plugins this theme currently supports.

Looking for a demo of the theme? You’re looking at it. Currently the xMark Blog Theme Site is using the current version of xMark.

Download the xMark WordPress Theme v1.0

Upcoming
Support for total theme flexibility with a color picker in the admin options menu.

I’ve done my best with testing this puppy out - however, that being said, if you find a bug or somewhere within the code that I tripped up, be sure to let me know and I’ll get a fix right quick!

I hope you enjoy xMark as much as I enjoyed creating it. Please do leave a comment if you end up using it on your site!

The xMark theme comes coded with this for you - All you need to do is add your Google Adsense code and you’re done! If you don’t add the code, nothing will show, so - for you WordPress MU users out there, you can still use this theme and the optional adsense code will not affect the template output at all.

To add your code, look in the Main Index template (index.php) and find this code:

<!--ADD YOUR YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE-->
<!--replace this line with your code-->
<!--END ADSENSE-->

See that line in the middle? This one:

<!--replace this line with your code-->

Remove JUST that line and replace it with your Adsense code. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Update File’ button at the bottom so your changes are made. That’s it - nothing to it, right?

This will display your Google Adsense ad block after ONLY the first post on your front page. Since Google only allows you to have 3 adblocks on the page - this gives you the freedom to add Google Adsense in your sidebars, if you’d like. That you can accomplish by using a Text Widget - no problem!

As an example, this site is using a 336×280 Google Adsense block in this area and it works pretty nice!