Ultimatum Theme – A First Look

The Ultimatum Theme by Wonderfoundry is a WordPress Theme Framework. Creating a responsive design with the Ultimatum Theme is simply a matter of drag-and-drop – or in other words; no coding required.

A theme with a responsive design will adapt the presentation of the web page to the screen of the device used by the visitor; be it a desktop, a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone. Hence, such a theme responds to the size and orientation of the screen.

Theme Options Panel

The Ultimatum Admin Panel comprises seven pages:

• General Settings
• SEO Options
• Font Library
• Templates
• Custom Post Types
• Developer Options
• Updates

The Developer Options are only available with the Developer’s License and the Designer’s License of the Ultimatum Theme – not with the Starter License.

The General Settings box includes options for logo, favicon, header and footer scripts, WooCommerce Integration, and a drop-down menu to select your preferred theme for the Pretty Photo feature – you can choose from six options.

The SEO Options page is a recent addition and is disabled upon install. When you prefer to use Ultimatum’s SEO settings above installing a third-party plugin, you can enable these on this page.

The SEO Options give you the means to tweak the Search Engine Optimization settings according to your taste. This page serves sections for:

• Document Title
• Document Head
• Robots Meta
• Archives

The Font Library page of the Ultimatum Theme, lets you can choose from 49 Cufon fonts, 49 Font-Face Fonts and the entire Google Font Library which currently covers 262 fonts. The Font Library gives you an easy interface for managing your preferred fonts. While doing so, the font previews will come in handy.

Creating Ultimatum Templates

Templates are the Ultimatum equivalent for child themes. These are named templates and not child themes, because in contrast with the usual WordPress child themes, the Ultimatum child themes are not separate themes.

Ultimatum Templates are groups of page layouts which – in case of the Developer’s and Designer’s license – you can not only import, but also export.

The Templates page includes four sections:

1. Create a New Template
2. Import a Template
3. Available Templates
4. Mobile Web Apps per Device

A template can have as many layouts as you want. You can assign a specific layout to posts as well as to pages while creating or editing a post or a page.

Layouts are created with the Layout Generator which is accessible through the Layouts button at the Available Templates section of the Templates page.

The Layout Generator distinguishes two kinds of layouts; full and partial.

Partial layouts are in fact building blocks – widgetized areas – which you create, use and reuse within full layouts. You can think of headers, footers, and widgets areas before and after the main content.

Full Layouts are recognized by your visitors as page layouts. These can be cloned; you can copy an existing layout so that you do not have to create a new layout from scratch. And you avoid altering an existing layout by mistake.

The default layout shows initially a completely blank canvas at the front end. In order to change this you turn to the Layout Generator. You need to:

1. create a new layout or edit an existing layout
2. populate that layout with widgets

The Ultimatum Theme installs with 18 custom widgets including two WordPress loops:

• Ultimatum Slide Show
• Ultimatum Author Definition
• Ultimatum BreadCrumps
• Ultimatum Cat/Taxonomy Definition
• Ultimatum Forms
• Ultimatum Include Page
• Ultimatum Logo
• Ultimatum Menu
• Ultimatum Recent Comments
• Ultimatum Recent Posts
• Ultimatum Sidebars
• Ultimatum Social
• Ultimatum Subpages Navigation
• Ultimatum Super Title
• Ultimatum Twitter
• Ultimatum Video
• WordPress Custom Loop
• WordPress Default Loop

Opening the CSS Editor is a matter of clicking a CSS button within the Layout Creator/Editor. When you do, a pop-up appears. However, you will not see any CSS code! What you will see are merely relevant toggle boxes.

These CSS toggle boxes give you the ability to make changes to the CSS code of elements by pointing and clicking – without coding. The Ultimatum Theme facilitates the 960 grid system for its Cascading Style Sheets.

Outside the Ultimatum panel, the theme framework adds a module for Slide Shows and one for Forms. The Slide Shows module lets you create galleries with one or more images.

The Forms Creator allows you to create contact forms – for example – by dragging and dropping form elements like Text Areas, Text Boxes, Drop Down Menus, Check Boxes, and Radio Buttons. When you drag a form element into the From Fields area, a dialog box will appear where you can enter the necessary values.

Building A Layout

Let’s follow the steps you need to take when you want to build a new layout with the Ultimatum Theme.

A basic blog page layout could include three rows:

1. header
2. content/sidebar
3. footer

When you create a new row with Ultimatum’s Layout Creator/Editor, you can choose from 28 styles. Each style divides the available width over a certain number of columns; ranging from a one 100% width column up to four 25% width columns and about any possible combination in between.

For our simple blog page we create a Layout Body with:

• a header row with two columns – one for the logo, the other one for an advertisement or a navigation menu
• a content/sidebar row with two columns – one for the content area, the other one for the sidebar
• a footer row will usually have three or four columns

Each row has its own Wrapper CSS and its own Container CSS. The Wrapper CSS defines the design of the screen wide background of a row, while the Container CSS defines the background of the row within the 960 pixel width area of your website.

In addition, each column has its own Column CSS. Editing the CSS code of any parts of the grid is a matter of:

1. opening the CSS Editor
2. selecting the appropriate toggle box
3. point-and-click to assign the desired values

In order to add content to your layout, you can drop your desired widgets into the preferred parts of the grid. You can do that at any time. Before, while or after tweaking the CSS code.

Wrapping Up

Drag-and-drop. Point-and-click. Basically, that is about it when you build layouts, designs and websites with the Ultimatum Theme. Creating awesome design remains an art that needs practice. However, building page structures and websites from scratch is really easy with the Ultimatum Theme.

As mentioned earlier, the Ultimatum Theme comes in three flavors:

• Starter License $65
• Developer’s License $125
• Designer’s License $170

The Starter License gives you a lifetime membership and support for one site.

The Developer’s License entitles you to support for an unlimited number of sites, WordPress multisite support, and the ability to export templates.

The Designer’s License adds the right to sell your templates to the Ultimatum Template Market. More details on the pricing plans are available here.

At the moment, the Ultimatum Developer License is available at Mighty Deals for only $57, and the Start License for only $37. Definitely worth the money in my opinion.