frugal35 banner Frugal 3.5 is better than everBelieve it or not, Frugal has just celebrated its first birthday. It seems like Frugal has been around much longer since the theme has made such a big splash in the WP theme community. Those of you who have been with me for a while know that I’ve been a Frugal theme fan from the beginning. In fact, this site used to be on a Frugal theme and I still use Frugal for another site of mine.

I’m not a product-pusher like many other MMO blogs but I don’t mind putting my stamp on a product, service, or person I believe in. In this case, Frugal meets all three.

The last time I mentioned Frugal was when Frugal 3.0 was released around Thanksgiving last year. Earlier this month, the Frugal team announced its latest version, Frugal 3.5, and it’s pretty amazing. Take a look at the updates:

  • Rearrangable Admin Page Option Boxes: The same flexibility and power you’ve come to expect in the options of your Frugal-based sites has been brought home to the admin interface. Each box of option sets is now draggable & sortable, collapsible & expandable. You can organize your admin pages however you want, with your essential options always visible and at the top of the page. The best part is, Frugal automatically remembers how you leave everything, and it will be there waiting for you no matter what browser or computer you log in from.
  • Frugal Theme Admin Menu has moved ‘Above the Fold’: With 3.5, we’ve decided to carve some space out for ourselves between ‘Comments’ and ‘Appearance’ in the WordPress Admin Sidebar. Not only does this save users on lower-resolution screens from needing to scroll down to see the menu, but it’s a subtle way of demonstrating that, with this release of Frugal 3.5, we’re on our way to the top!
  • WordPress 3.0 Compatibility: We’ve done extensive testing to ensure that Frugal is ahead of the game and ready for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. As WordPress evolves from a simple blogging platform to a robust Content Management System, Frugal continues to give you maximum control over your site. The most exciting new WP 3.0 feature, in our opinion, is the fully customizable Navigation Bar. Once you upgrade to WP 3.0, all you need to do to enable the new navbar on your Frugal sites is to flip a switch.
  • WordPress MU / 3.0 Multi-User Enabled: Another exciting aspect of WP 3.0 is that the WP Crew has folded WP-MU into Core. Frugal has worked with WP-MU for quite some time, but we’re pleased to see that this feature is going mainstream. We’ve done some testing with Frugal and WP 3.0 Multi-User, and have been highly impressed. If you manage a multi-user site, by enabling Frugal and setting the Dynamic Styles to PHP mode you can let each and every sub-site have its own appearance with just one installation of Frugal! This is a perfect use for skins from our skin store. You can get thousands of unique looks with a single theme.
  • Refined image inputs: With Frugal 3.5, we’ve removed the need to type in the names of your uploaded images into the options pages by hand, and replaced the old textfields with drop-down menus showing all available images. This should prove to be a big timesaver — no more “Did I call that file bg-header.png or header-bg.jpg?”

And that’s just some of the new stuff. Let’s not forget that Frugal:

  • Has over 600 custom options
  • Has built in SEO
  • Is designed for developers and non-developers

I don’t endorse too many products and Frugal is the only theme I promote. I’m not saying there aren’t other great premium themes (Thesis, WooThemes, etc…) but personally, I really love Frugal.

Anyway, go check out some of the examples of what others have done with Frugal. I’m always amazed at how creative some of those are. Of course, I would prefer if you use my Frugal affiliate link.

Oh, and let me remind you that I used the word affiliate, which means I may get compensated. Don’t let that stop you since I’ve been writing about Frugal way before I was even an affiliate. Go get Frugal 3.5 today!


Related Posts on Free Blog Help Related Posts around the web