Want to get started developing the perfect WordPress theme for your blog? Want to do it with Thematic? And don’t know where to begin? You’re not alone. That’s why I’ve starting something I’m calling the Thematic Development Series. A series of Thematic Child Themes that show you how I would get it done. First up, The Thematic Power Blog Theme.
Altamente Decorativo and Bendler.tv have joined forces to release a really interesting, structurally minimal, one-column Child Theme for Thematic, Aether.
WordPress Lover Hafiz Rahman of WP Lover has let loose a little love for Thematic in the form of the Simple Love Theme, a lovely 3-column WordPress Child Theme that builds on top of Thematic.
Freelance Graphic Designer Able Paris has come up with a sweet new WordPress Child Theme for Thematic: Sugar Cane.
Thematic version 0.9 represents a major change in Thematic. Actually, this release represents everything I’ve learned from the Thematic user community and my continual efforts in studying how most WordPress themes are actually used.
Thematic is all about you: what you want to do with it, how you’re using WordPress, and how you’re going to use it to meet your online goals.
Head to the Thematic download page and get it now or keep reading and find out what the story is with the best version yet of your favorite WordPress Theme Framework.
As you can see, there have been some changes. Thankfully, they’ve all been for the better.
First of all, I’ve done away with building to a consistent baseline. That is, having everything line up to the same baseline across content and sidebar. In theory, or on a static site, that’s a great idea. In practice, I’ve found that it ends up being a detriment when you’re customizing using the default style as a guideline or starting point. Basically, things stop lining up and it makes me koo-koo bananas when I go to visit your blog.
What I’ve replaced it with is a complete rethink of the Thematic typographic scale that adds up to a more harmonious overall appearance. Something beautiful on it’s own but easy to fit into almost any design. You can think of it as a damn elegant theme that’s ready for you to build a successful website with. Beautiful, pleasant, damn elegant typography, and simple design, are a must for engaging your website visitors and keeping them coming back. Now Thematic takes care of all that for you.
And the default Thematic style is easier to customize. No more multiple shades of blue (but keep reading to find out how Thematic Classic can bring it all back) that look kinda weird with your custom image header. In it’s stead, a simple and consistent scale of gray ready for you to take advantage of and color up yourself. (And super easy to edit with a find and replace in your favorite text editor!)
The real icing on the cake for people ready to take their Thematic theme to the next level, Hooks and Filters, are now everywhere in Thematic. Making your Child Theme a potential super-plugin for WordPress. You can see the complete list on the new (in development) Guide To Customizing The Thematic Theme Framework along with code snippets that you can just cut and paste into your Thematic Child Theme.
Last year’s Future of WordPress Themes (read it here) found 11 people committed to thinking creatively about WordPress themes stopping to look where WordPress theming was heading—and now we’re doing it again! These 15 people—designers, developers, and WordPress enthusiasts—are some of the people who will shape WordPress themes, and what they mean, into version 3.0 and beyond.
Here is how they answered the question “What is the future of WordPress Themes?”
I think the future of WordPress themes is heading into a very positive direction – there are a lot of designers who are developing some really great themes. It seems that a lot of us have our own unique style, which makes it great for users to enjoy a wide selection of quality themes. Another thing that I have personally experienced is building plugin-type functions into a theme, which enhances it that much more. Special thanks go to guys like Nathan Rice who are focusing more on the code/functionality of a theme, because they are adding to the overall impact that themes are making. Overall, I’d say that the next year of WordPress themes should be as productive, if not more than the last, and the ability to use WordPress as a content management system only seems to become an easier thing to achieve.
Brian Gardner has made many a WordPress theme and currently releases his pay-to-download GPL themes over at StudioPress.
I hate editing my WordPress theme files—and I’m a theme developer! It makes it a pain to update the theme when a new, better version comes out. And if you ever change your theme you’re either going to forget about some crucial edit you’ve made, or spend wasted hours hunting down all your customizations. Didn’t we decide to use WordPress because it was so simple to use?
Well, it is simple to use. The secret is to write a quick plugin. The really big secret is it’s not that hard.
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My name is Ian Stewart. I’m a professional designer, and WordPress enthusiast, trying to shape how we think about the exciting and dynamic world of WordPress themes.
Back in 2006 I took my first tentative steps into the world of theme design. I didn’t know it at the time but those first steps would change how I think about design completely. Since then, I've done my best to change how we all think about designing WordPress themes.
Come and check out what I'm linking to and thinking about by following me around on Twitter and StumbleUpon
You're looking at a custom WordPress Child Theme based on the highly extensible and, quite frankly, ninja-like, Thematic Theme.
Thematic is a WordPress Theme Framework that gives you all sorts of options for customizing your WordPress theme in a super-smart, bulletproof fashion. Better yet, it's Free. Get started with it today by finding out more about it.
WordPress Menu Tricks
In this post I’m going to show you how to take WordPress Menu Editing to the next level. You’re going to learn how to use Primary and Secondary menus in your WordPress theme; Add descriptive sub-title links to your menu items like some popular WordPress themes and sites; Filter the menu of a WordPress theme; Add special CSS classes to
wp_page_menu; and finally, how to hand-code your own WordPress menu for the ultimate in control.Here’s how to make your WordPress menu jump through hoops.
Keep reading »