Category: Asides

An examination of five clean, minimalist themes for WordPress.

The 20 Best WordPress Themes for Small Business. ThemeShaper managed to get two themes on the list. Thanks, Best WordPress Themes.

Benedict Eastaugh, Tarski theme developer, on what you can do with Child Themes in WordPress 2.7: “Greater possibilities are now also opened up for treating themes more like frameworks or plugins. We may see themes that are more of a code library than a set of templates.”

For consideration: WordPress Theme Options actually make your theme worse—if!—if they ape functionality better provided by a plugin. Think twice about those theme options.

Want to collapse a sidebar and make it’s containing element—like a <div> or <ul>—disappear when there are no widgets inside of it? Check out this WordPress.org support post.

For consideration: “Premium” WordPress theme authors are marginalizing their themes by ignoring the GPL. The audience for their themes will become smaller and smaller as “WordPress-approved” themes are pushed to a growing user base through WordPress itself. Yes? No?

Justin Tadlock has launched his new WordPress themes club which takes advantage of the Child Theme capabilities we’ve been talking about here on ThemeShaper. Sort of similar to what I’m doing with Travailler and Thematic but in a more centralized location. Check out his cheeky slogan while you’re there. It’s sure to make all the right sorts of hot water for him.

Print design holds you in place. It keeps your eyeballs bouncing around, it doesn’t let them go. While web design pulls your eyeballs down a path. It tries to channel the raging river of your attention through a site’s little stream.

That’s just my opinion. As a print designer and as a web designer. But here’s my question: what does this mean for blog design and the particular purposes of blogs?

It looks like Child Themes will be able to override templates in Parent Themes and add new custom page templates in WordPress 2.7. I loaded up the bleeding edge version this morning and tried it out. Works like a charm. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible. This might just change the way WordPress theming gets done and will certainly make a lot of people’s lives a whole lot easier.

If theme updating becomes part of the WordPress core experience—like plugin updating did—and if the Most Popular list in the themes directory reflects downloads made through those updates: that’s a pretty decent resource for WordPress users looking for themes. Instead of a list of the most downloaded—and potentially discarded themes—we’ll have a list of the most used WordPress themes.

This is just a quick note to say that Thematic version 0.6 is out. I had to make a few changes to have it included in the themes directory and, of course, those changes turned into monumental changes. Check out library/functions/hooks-filters.php if you don’t believe me. I’ll write more about it later but I’d like to give special thanks to Scott Wallick for helping me to get where I wanted to be with this release. Anyway, download it now from the WordPress Themes Directory. Thanks for using Thematic!