This is the home of the WordPress theme Benevolence Reloaded, which is a WordPress 3.0 (and hopefully many newer versions coming) compatible update to the popular WordPress 1.5 Benevolence theme by Theron Parlin, so named to distinguish it from the last version available at The Benevolence web site. Benevolence is a popular theme used on pseudoreal, many other blogs including those hosted at wordpress.com, and has been ported for other software including LiveJournal, Blogger, and Blogsome. Benevolence Reloaded is my attempt to share the result of having updated Benevolence over the years to add new features and replace deprecated WordPress functionality with contemporary WordPress functionality. It turns out that it’s a tremendous amount of work to convert a theme you’ve been modifying for your own needs into something that has configurable widgets and an admin panel and can be released to the public. Now I understand why so many themes don’t get updated.
This page you’re reading now (unless you’re reading scraped content) was created by Benevolence Reloaded and is styled using the included Benevolence Reloaded style sheet with (primarily) classic Benevolence settings, and displays the classic Benevolence masthead image. There’s more than 50 plugins running on this site however, so if you want to see what it looks like “out of the box”, you should look at the Benevolence Reloaded Demo Site, which should give you an idea of exactly what you get when you install Benevolence Reloaded.
Download the latest version of Benevolence Reloaded:
Since the last version of Benevolence was 2.0, I decided to make the first version of Benevolence Reloaded 3.0 to help emphasize that it is newer than the released versions of Benevolence, which end at 2.0. WordPress 3.0 is also the earliest version of WP that Benevolence-Reloaded supports. It is in everyone’s best interests if you upgrade older versions to the latest version of WordPress.
Using Benevolence Reloaded:
- Installing
- Configuring
- Using the Template Files
- Differences from classic Benevolence
- Relationship to Benevolence on WordPress.com
Support:
I hope nobody needs any, because I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not kidding either. What CSS I know, I learned working on this theme. A year or so later and I have retained little of what I learned. Questions can however, be left as comments below. Improvements are most certainly welcomed.
Thanks:
My thanks to Sonny Parlin for Benevolence, upon which Benevolence Reloaded is based. There would be no Benevolence Reloaded without Benevolence.
It turns out that acquiring the knowledge to correctly make themes for WordPress is no small investment in time. If you use Benevolence Reloaded, and want to show your appreciation, I’d be very pleased if you buy my lunch or dinner with a donation of $5 to $20. Every little bit helps in this recession, so a couple of bucks for coffee would be appreciated as well.
3 Comments so far
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How can I get a copy of this theme? The download links on this site aren’t working. 🙁
on Sunday, April 26th 2009 at 10:15 pm |
It’s not ready yet. As you can see here, there’s still a few rough edges. I haven’t been able to work on it in over a month now, but I hope to get it finished off in the next week or two.
on Monday, April 27th 2009 at 5:23 pm |
Man…finally found a fully functional version of this theme…yet, it isn’t ready for prime time. Would really like to use this puppy!
on Thursday, April 30th 2009 at 11:01 am |