I really enjoy reading the various blogs and sites authored by Chris Pirillo and enjoy watching his live stream from time to time. Over the last few months, Chris has really been busting his butt with publishing some amazing content on the Internet and I am truly impressed.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Chris was working on developing a free WordPress theme for the WordPress community. I was pretty excited with this becuase I know all the resources that Chris has towards developing something like this. There are many really skilled developers in the community who produce some amazing WordPress themes, so for me, it was exciting to see what a guy like Chris could do in developing a WordPress Theme.

More About WicketPixie WordPress Theme

After a few weeks, Chris Pirillo finally made the announcement and released WicketPixie. This has been a very huge success so far and over 450 people have downloaded this theme already. The theme is totally free do download and use. Chris notes that this WordPress theme will work on WordPress 2.51 running PHP5.

How To Install WicketPixie

While Chris isn’t providing any advanced support for this WordPress theme, and I can understand why too, I wanted to pitch in and provide a basic overview of how to install this WordPress theme as it requires a few more added steps that the typical WordPress theme.

Once you have downloaded the Zip file from Chris, simply extract the contents to your computer. You will be presented with this:

1. wp-content/
2. drinkme.txt (e.g. read me file)

Open up an FTP client such as FileZilla and log into your web server FTP account. Navigate your computer side to WicketPixie wp-content folder and then navigate your server side to your blog wp-content directory. Here is a screen shot:

Navigate both sides to the themes folder / directory and then simply drag the WicketPixie folder into your server wp-content/themes/ directory. Final result should be wp-content/themes/wicketpixie/ on your server side in FTP.

Next step is to put both sides to the wp-content/plugins folder/directory and drag and drop two plugin files into your wordpress plugin directory.

Next step is to put both sides of your FTP client to the wp-content/uploads directory/folder and proceed to drag and drop the activity folder.

After you have successfully uploaded the WicketPixie WordPress theme via FTP you can now log into your WordPress Dashboard. Navigate to your Plugins menu and activate the WicketPixie Source Manager Plugin.

After you active the WicketPixie Source Manager, click on the Manage Tab and then click on the newly added WicketPixie Sources tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page to check to see if you have a permission setting error:

If you see an error like the above, you need to set the permissions to the activity folder to 777. Simply navigate back to your wp-content/upload/ directoy in FTP and right click the activity folder and change the permissions to 777.

Next step is to activate the WicketPixie WordPress theme. This part may be very familiar to you. However, just in case you don’t know, simply click on the design tab and then scroll down until you see the WicketPixie WordPress theme. Once you have found the theme, simply click on it to activate it. After that you are done!

Configure WicketPixie

WicketPixie comes with some amazing features that are typically not found with other WordPress themes. One of the main features is the ability to syndicate your content from various other sources you contribute on such as YouTube. While most of these new features are easy to figure out, I’ll briefly touch on them here.

The WicketPixie Options. This allows you total control over customizing how you want your WordPress blog to look and apprear to readers. You can change the font colors, sizes, and even the styles. Additionally you can change the background color of your blog and even upload your own backgrounds. All in all The WicketPixie Options gives you very close to total control over the look and feel of your blog without having to modify the CSS file manually.

The WicketPixie Sources. This allows you to add external content sources into your WordPress blog. Adding new sources is as simple as adding a source title, URL and Feed (RSS) URL. From there you will be able to showcase many of your external sources.

The WicketPixie Faves. This is an amazing feature to the WordPress theme as you are able to add all your favorites into your WordPress blog to share with your readers. Setting this up is very simple. All you need to do is add a title to each favorite and add the feed URL to your favorite and instantly you are sharing your favorite feeds with your readers.

Learn More About Chris Pirillo and WicketPixie

You can read more about WicketPixie and download it on his blog. Also be sure to invest time into reading his post that explains in detail all the features included with this WordPress theme. This WordPress theme is a little more complex to install compared to others; however, if you put forth some time into installing it successfully, you will soon harbor a pipeline of wondeful information for your readers and followers. This free WordPress theme is very advanced and extremely well coded. I am very thankful that Chris Pirillo invested his own personal time into contributing such a masterpiece for the WordPress community. You should visit his post and be sure to leave a comment and thank him.