Affiliate Theme 1.1 Released

I just got an email from the Affiliate Theme guys that they have just released version 1.1 of AffiliateTheme. I took a look at the release notes and there are a few really nice new features, mostly based on user feedback.

Separate Blog Layout
I thought this was a big drawback of using Affiliate Theme before and I’m glad they added this. You can now have a separate blog together with your landing page. This is great as it allows you to get the SEO and quality score benefits that the extra content on a blog will give you. You can enable this functionality in the Theme Options and there is a new option to set the layout of the blog itself. Currently blogs can support the left column and right column layouts. You will also have to add a new category called blog, and any of your blog posts need to be part of this category.

More Flexible Media Boxes
Now you don’t need to show the Media Boxes on every post, and they can be configured to show on a post level. There is also an added option to embed videos in the media boxes along with images.

More configurable sidebar and footer
There are now options to configure the titles, fonts, and colors of the sidebar. The footer options now allow you to choose which pages, categories to display.

There were also some other minor improvements like rounded call to action buttons and the ability to add a border around your pages.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the new Affiliate Theme release. I have already moved all my sites using this theme to the new version. It is great that the guys at Unique Blog Designs are very receptive to user suggestions and I am looking forward to future updates. I also read that the next batch of banner graphics will be ready on April 17th. I was actually kind of disappointed in some of the graphics that shipped with the theme, so I’m hoping this new batch will be better. According to the guys, we will now be able to overlay the text on the tagline of the banners which is a nice improvement.