Agregado is October 2008’s featured free WordPress theme.
Agregado, created for Smashing Magazine by a couple of designer-types, is an innovative WordPress theme intended to help solve a problem that I, and others too apparently, have noticed. Some of us blog in multiple locations, and use sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, etc. We’re creating content all over the place, in so many places people will have a hard time keeping up with everything you do. And with Twitter, he have even less time and content for a personal blog.
Agregado was inspired by the recent popularity of services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr, and by a recent trend Zeldman calls ‘the vanishing personal website’. The theme attempts to rebuild that idea of a personal website, incorporating a lifestream carousel alongside standard blog posts, keeping your fragmented data all in one place.
I had had a similar idea over a year ago, and have kept coming back to the same idea since. I wanted to put together some sort of WordPress theme or something to combine a personal blog with content pulled from other sources of content. It looks like Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson beat me to it. My theme would have been quite different had I gotten around to fleshing it out more (maybe I will some day).
The theme itself has a nice look to it, and it does a good job of explaining a wide array of relevant information on one page. Your blog posts, your lifestream, a brief “About Me” blurb, a contact form, etc.
A page is added to the Admin when you install the theme, allowing you to edit the many options. You input your profile names on various social-type websites (I wish there were support for more though), set the email for the contact form, etc.
I have to say “great job” to the theme’s creators. This theme rocks.
