UPDATE – 16 November 2010 – Recently I’ve updated my new theme and switched from Frugal 3.3 to Frugal 3.6 right now. The reason is quite simple. The newly added features looks awesome.
Before to give you a sneak peek of the newly added, I would make a little summary of the main features for those don’t know this great premium WordPress Theme yet.
What Is Frugal Theme?
My friend Eric Hamm is the designer that created the Frugal WordPress theme that powers this blog. Frugal is a Premium WordPress theme for those like me whom likes to mess around with our theme.
I think screwing up a theme is part of blogging daily work, because it is important to optimize any aspect of layout and design in order to make ours web pages most attractive.
When it comes to getting a free theme, if on one hand you have a lot of free themes available out there, and most of them are crap, on the other hand you need to know that most of them don’t have integrated widget. Also, no free theme give you the necessary support and this is a great lack into your work as blogger or affiliate marketer.
Have You Need Of Frugal?
Recently, someone asked me this question: Frugal or Thesis? What to choose? What is better?
Well, one things seem to be clear is that Frugal is different from Thesis. If you want to get the Frugal features, then Thesis is not for you. If you think that Thesis features is just what you’re looking for, most probably Frugal is not for you. If you want a well organized WordPress Theme, then Thesis is for you, but if you want a clean theme with a wide space for your advertisers, frugal is right for you.
We know people don’t want to be hung out to dry, so to help you get a full sense of what this theme is all about, here I’ve put the main features who this great provides.
- A 2-column right-sidebar layout.
- A 2-column balanced sidebar layout a “thin” layout.
- A wide layout.
- Three “Top feature” boxes across the top
- Excluding certain page from your navigation bar directly from your dasboard into the option page.
- Let you add an RSS subscription link into your navigation bar.
- Add a follow me Twitter link.
- Add a search box.
Customization
Through its admin area you can change how the design looks and where information is displayed, so it is perfect for beginners and experienced designers alike. Just look at the image below to see what you can change of your font.
What I particularly like about Frugal is that it provides a minimalistic, clean design. The default design use the Georgia font for headings and Arial for body text. Text is black or dark gray, and links are a nice dark blue. There’s enough whitespace around elements that you can use to advertising.
Frugal is very customizable thanks its wide array of widgets. You can customize any aspect of your content, such as the fonts or change the colors, size, alignment, letter spacing, and so on. The image above is only a sneak peek of what this Theme can do.
Documentation Is Great
Most beginners should be able to take advantage of all the above features without be a coder. Don’t worry if you are a beginner and if you don’t know how to start with Frugal, a complete and detailed documentation will help you to explain any step by step process to walk you through it.
You can go to the Frugal forums if you have other question where you will find other expert. Also, you have many videos that will show you how it works.
Frugal General Overview
In general Frugal provides some features that really add the value to the theme. It will bring the design control to the next level. Here the details:
- One Click Skin Creation: Once you’re done designing a Frugal Skin you just type the name of your Skin and click ‘Export Skin’ to create and download your new Skin file and you’re done.
- One Click Skin Installation: Installing a Skin is even easier. You just locate your Frugal Skin zip folder, click ‘Import Skin’ and you’re done!
- Much refined Import/Export feature: Now there’s a One Click Frugal Options Export button and the Import is just a matter of checking the boxes next to the options pages you want to Import and then upload your Export file.
- Bulk Delete Images: No longer do you have to delete images one at a time. You can now select all and then delete.
- Increase Your WordPress Memory by flipping a switch. This new option allows you to raise your WordPress memory limit to 64 megabytes if you need a bit more memory to run WordPress, your theme and all your plugins.
- Full Localization: Frugal now includes an .po and .mo file to make it much easier to translate Frugal into any language.
Finally, here what the new Frugal 3.6 bring into table.
The release of Frugal 3.6 is a bittersweet milestone for us at Frugal HQ. Not only is it the first time we haven’t added any features or options in a new version, but we also went so far as to completely remove the Snapshots feature we introduced in Frugal 3.3.
For most of you, Frugal has been installing and performing without any difficulty every time. Unfortunately, it’s become apparent that the Snapshots feature in Frugal was asking more of some Web Servers than they were willing to do. Those of you who had trouble in the past with permissions issues or other server-related environmental conflicts know that the benefits of the Snapshots feature were outweighed by the hassle of getting your servers to play nice with Frugal.
At the time we created it, Snapshots felt like such a great addition to the Frugal feature set that we worked it into almost all corners of Frugal, from every click of the “Save” button to our installation process to our import/export features. What we’ve learned in the few months since Frugal 3.3 is that, between the Snapshots trouble and some other rare issues, things were adding up. Lots of tiny leaks can sink a ship, and so it was that we decided to pour our efforts for Frugal 3.6 into patching all the little annoyances we could find.
The bright side of all of this is that it marks the first step towards amazing things in store for the future of Frugal! Our goal for Frugal 3.6 was to make Frugal as easy to install and operate as possible, regardless of what Web Hosting Company you choose to host your sites on. In the days and weeks following this release, we will be watching closely for any other details to fine-tune before we move on to the fun stuff.
The following video will go into Frugal detail, but for any frugal theme documentation I will reccomend to visit their site too.
Frugal come with a premium version that goes from $79 for a single user license, while the developer license goes up to $199.
Concusion
Is Frugal a good theme for beginners? Yes, I can attest it, because I’m using it on my website The3dtechnologies.com and natural-supplements-tips.com as well.
Frugal is clean, fast and easy to use wp theme. You no need to know a lot of things to use it. It has a lot of positive stuff, so I can only recommend to use it and stand behind that recommendation.
