Aperture

Today we’ll have a closer look at Aperture sold by WooThemes. It’s a well-coded and well-designed photography focused theme that leaves ample room for both text and pictures. Being built on WooThemes’ own framework gives it a solid ground to stand on, although it’s not entirely without problems.

You’ll notice that Aperture puts focus on individual photographs. The main attraction of the front page is a slider containing the latest posts, and below it you’ll see the categories and a widget area you can customize yourself. The exhibitionistic (aren’t we all?) can write a short blurb about him or herself in an about box complete with image, reachable through the options page – ideal for branding.

Working with Aperture is simple. The theme doesn’t force Wordpress into doing anything it’s not meant to do: it provides a dedicated photo uploading box on your write screen so that the body area is left alone for your writing. When you upload a photograph Aperture automatically crops and resizes it for you so that the picture fits the different sizes required. This is not a bad approach – it makes your site faster to load and your photos look better compared to false downscaling using code, and it certainly saves a lot of time.

But the approach also means that you cannot switch to a non Woo theme easily – if you do, you’ll have to re-upload your images to accomodate the new theme. This is a general problem in many Wordpress photo themes, but using something exclusive this way makes it harder to switch.

Text is well handled. When viewing a single post you’ll first get the image, and below that a well designed text area. A summary is also available on category pages and the front page, giving you the opportunity to work with words to complement your imagery.

Great category-based navigation, but lacking search

Aperture’s navigation is primarily category based. There’s always an easily accessible category dropdown at the top right of the theme. When a user clicks on it he’s taken to a quickly scannable archive page displaying the image and a summary of the body text. The theme supports tags as well, displaying the same archive page when browsing through them. Navigating Aperture this way is a breeze.

Sadly, the search isn’t as well done. You must add a search widget to display the search box, and the results are displayed in an ordinary list without images. Not optimal for a photography based Wordpress theme. The easy-to-use category navigation makes up for this pretty well, but it can be a critical flaw depending on your site setup.

Plenty of configuration options

The theme comes equipped with a bunch of options to make customization easier for you. From the theme’s option page you’re able to upload your own logo and favicon. If you create a static page that you don’t want included in the navigation, there’s an option for that. There are also built-in advertising zones if you want to get into that ballgame, controlled through the options panel. Aperture even comes in 12 different colour schemes. But despite all of the good Aperture does, the theme cannot accomodate images hosted elsewhere. You have to upload the photo to Wordpress so that the image resizing script can run its course. This isn’t a huge drawback, but if you plan on reducing your server load this way Aperture simply isn’t for you.

Using Aperture to it’s fullest means uploading large images accompanied with well written texts. Considering this and its category based navigation, the theme is a good fit for a photographers’ portfolio. Being very easy to work with and requiring no crawling about in code, you’re guaranteed to spend most of your time where you should – tinkering with your imagery and presentation. That alone makes the theme well worth its money; the rest is just icing on the cake.

Others about Aperture

It’s really hard to find good reviews about Aperture – if you Google it you’ll mostly find a bunch of people reiterating keywords to place high in search engines. Nevertheless, here are a few interesting tidbits from the interwebs:

papasoft.com – Rick Tuttle of papasoft describes how he used Aperture for a church community site.
WPblogger – WPblogger has a general review of WooThemes, the company that sells the theme. Aperture is built on the same framework as most other themes from the company, so this review has a few relevant points.
Tripwire – Twipire’s got a good collection of Aperture screenshots. Doesn’t beat checking out the demo though.
Aperture on WooThemes – Naturally, you’ll find Aperture’s full featureset over where it’s sold – at WooThemes.