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Chyrp is a new blogging engine designed to be lightweight yet customizable, and it claims that it “destroys the fine line separating a blog and a tumblelog.” Sounds okay to me. The demo is available here, although some of the functionality has been disabled due to Digg Effect (591 diggs so far, in case someone’s interested).

Anyways, I’m not here to write a review about the engine. Not yet. Instead, after reading about Chryp a little, I decided to learn and find out how the theme system works. While I obviously can’t claim that I have completely mastered the art of Chyrp theme creation, this is what I came up with.

Introducing Freebird, a Chyrp Theme

This one’s a simple, tumblelog-flavored theme with relatively narrow width and minimal decoration so that your content remains the focus of the site. The screenshot above does not show the admin bar, for which you will need to install Chyrp and use this theme to find out.

Interested? Download Freebird, completely free.

Credits and Stuff

• The name Freebird is taken from a song by YUI (not to be confused with the Yahoo! UI Library).
• The background pattern is modified from one pattern made by Squidfingers. Squidfingers’ patterns rock.
• Icons are from Brand Spanking New’s Mini Icons v2, which by the way is an awesome, free, iconset.
• Most PHP files inside the theme are copied directly from Chyrp Default, modified here and there to fit.
• This theme is licensed under GPL.

Conclusion

I plan to create a separate post to discuss more about Chyrp, including how the theme system works, so this part will not be too comprehensive. In short, I find myself grinning a lot while working on Freebird. The theme system is indeed powerful and highly modifiable, and it’s been quite a fun little project to work on. There’s only one page of documentation, but it’s really quite intuitive once you dig into the theme files.

So, this is where I leave you to play around with the new theme. Have fun!