Free Thesis theme clone (based on re-styling of Atahualpa)

The  Thesis theme for WordPress truly is a great theme for a business website, for the following reasons and more:

• It installs “out of the box” with a clean, professional look
• Wide range of configuration options
• Easily customizable through custom CSS and with a large support community
• Add content anywhere with the Thesis open hook system, which plays very well with OpenHook plugin.

Thesis does, however, cost $87, and so several people have attempted to create a theme similar to Thesis (emulate the Thesis look-and-feel).  The limitation of these is, of course, the lack of customizability — Thesis is much more than “just a pretty face”, there is a tremendous amount of thinking that has gone “under the hood” as well for changing the layout to your needs.  For more on themes vs. theme frameworks, see Choosing a good WordPress theme for your business or corporate website

Short of buying the real thing, however, you now have a better solution.  There is another excellent theme framework that offers an overlapping (and in some ways superior) feature set called Atahualpa.  What’s more, it’s free, and it can be downloaded directly through your WordPress site’s dashboard.  Only problem is, the default styling of Atahualpa is a bit clunky.

No problem — CSS to the rescue.  After procrastinating on this for some weeks I finally “bit the bullet” and styled Atahualpa to a Thesis look-alike.  Here is the result:

(Click the image for the demo site)

I left the default Atahualpa banner image (which is not provided by default in Thesis) since I find the need to write custom CSS to put a banner image in Thesis a bit tacky (Atahualpa comes with a dashboard option to display a rotating banner).

Update: I have now got the styling of the page menu bar right as well and, thanks to the brilliant contribution of Larry Wilcox, a top right widget area that can be used for rotating image, video etc.

Installation instructions (Updated for Atahalpa 3.5.3):

1. Currently (Aug. 10) the Atahualpa version stored on WordPress theme directory is 3.4.9 which will not work.  So start with Appearance > Add New Themes,  search for Atahualpa and install it. Then check the version number in Appearance > Atahualpa theme options.  If it’s NOT 3.5.3, download the latest Atahualpa zipfile from BFA website to your desktop, then install with Appearance > Themes > Install, activate the “Upload” pane, and then browse and install the Atahuala zipfile.
2. Save this Atahualpa settings extract file to your desktop (right-click > Save).
3. Select Appearance > Atahualpa Theme Options > Import , and import the Atahualpa settings file.
4. If you want to create a top right custom widget area to emulate Thesis with the two parallel right side-bars underneath, first install and activate Advanced Text plugin (search for it and install in Plugins), then follow the instructions in this article for using it to register 3 new widget areas.   The top right widget area is called My New Widget Area.  If you don’t want this, just use your normal right sidebar and right inner sidebar (no need to register the 3 new widget areas or use Advanced Text plugin)
5. If you just want a single right image rotator / video + one right sidebar, you obviously don’t need to use custom widgets either.  Just use your regular Atahualpa right side-bar.
6. Remember to configure your right sidebar width (if different from the default) in Atahualpa Options > Sidebars.

Enjoy — if you like, please comment.