Bored with regular WordPress layout? Do all blogs appear the same to you? Content on the left, sidebar on the right, and that’s it? Centered, narrow width that makes you regrets buying that brand new widescreen monitor? If that’s the case, maybe you should try Kiwi. Kiwi (i’m still confused whether to call it a plugin or a theme) was developed to break the old mold of blogging. Well, particularly blogging on wordpress. Basically Kiwi is a theme, but it does much more work than a regular theme. Kiwi packed with many plugins that makes blogging life easier and more enjoyable.

Some of the Kiwi’s highlight features are:

• Meta image post, means that you can have different banner image for every post you made.
• Randomized banner, self explaining, you know what it does.
• Featured Post, if you feel that some of your post are masterpieces and you don’t want it to be buried within your achieves, then this feature is exactly what you want.
• Del.icio.us plugin, you can list places where have you been to according to del.icio.us
• Latest comment plugin, well em…self explaining, it lists recent comment received by your blog.
• Category list and category menu, nothing really new here, but it is more nicely formatted.

Few months back there, installing Kiwi need lots of sweat and patience, you need to install separate WordPress plugins in order Kiwi to work. Although doing so is not that hard, but it was definitely not for everyone. I’ve tried the old Kiwi and it’s nice, but I never truly set it up on my blog. My wait for a better Kiwi is finally paid off with Kiwi 1.1 release (which is compatible with WordPress 2.0). All things are packed in one place, and activated just like any other regular theme. Really nice work! So what are you waiting for? Don’t continue to read this stupid blog, go get Kiwi now!

If you wanna go further, then the CSS file is there for you. You can find some of the CSS in Crystal site. I use Kiwi Peachy, by the way and tweak it my taste, but since I’m not a CSS guru at all, so I still used table tag here and there. I also striped some of Kiwi feature, especially things that generate random things, not only to reduce the load time but also because I thinks this blog is mine, so I decide 100% what I want to display :-) ) Well, at least for now. By the way, what made this Kiwi template is so special to me the sunflower picture on the left-top side, because it was actually shot by me, during my trip to Curug Sewu, two weeks days ago. :-)

FYI, Another promising Kiwi-like project I found on the net is Squible, but it is still in early development stage and has not released a full version yet. Currently what I like most about Squibble is their slogan: “Squible, as Stable as Donald Trump’s Hair!“. Eh, now how cool is that?