Tag Archives: Theme

Solar Theme for Ghost Blogs

Oct 17, 2013 by Matt | Posted in Design, Featured 139 Comments

Need a stylish new design for your Ghost blog? Looking for something that puts your content first, with an emphasis on reducing eye strain? Allow me to introduce my new theme (which is technically a port of the one I made for Jekyll), based on the Solarized color palette. It includes stylesheets for the default light-on-dark version, and for the alternate dark-on-light one.

Solar Theme for Ghost

The theme is responsive, with a little bit of  JavaScript that collapses the left navigation into a <select> box on mobile-sized displays. It supports both uploadable logos (which replace them text-based heading at the top) and cover images, which appear at the very top of the page. Your author bio and profile picture appear in the sidebar when viewing a post page, as well.

Installing the Theme

  1. Download it here (or clone it on GitHub)
  2. Upload the solar directory to your Ghost blog’s content/themes folder.
  3. Go to the Settings page of the Ghost backend and select solar from the Theme dropdown. Save the settings.

Be sure to edit the default.hbs template to add or remove any links you want in the navigation list. You’ll probably want to insert the link to your own Twitter profile instead of leaving it as mine, and maybe add your other social networking profiles.

Launch: A Free WordPress Tumblog Theme

May 16, 2012 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Looking for a stylish microblogging theme for WordPress, so you can mix in some Tumblr-style posts with your longer writings? Themezilla’s “Launch” theme is a fresh choice. It supports the post formats API, and even includes the PSD source files if you want to customize it beyond what the theme options allow.

I might have used Launch for my personal blog if it had been released before I made my new custom theme.

Smashing Magazine Publishes a New WordPress Theme Roundup for 2010

Aug 25, 2010 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Some of Smashing Magazine’s most popular posts have been their roundups of free WordPress themes. It has been about a year since the last one, and most of the themes featured are looking kind of dated. I was surprised to see a new roundup appear in my feed reader recently, full of modern themes that are more up to today’s standards.

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes are outdated or updated now.

100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition [Smashing Magazine]

Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design to Launch PliablePress

May 6, 2010 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 3 Comments

On May 10th, Michael Martin, the blogger and designer behind Pro Blog Design, will launch his latest business venture: PliablePress.

PliablePress is going to be a purveyor of quality WordPress themes, particularly ones that “aren’t simple little themes that you can turn out in a weekend.”

The themes will all be based upon the custom “Chameleon” framework. It offers some functionality along the lines of Thesis or the WooFramework, letting the end user make customizations without digging into the template files.

Even though all of our other themes use Chameleon as a groundwork, you can use it on its own as well.

On its own, Chameleon is an ultra-clean, professional looking site. You might find that it’s already everything you want in a web design

I’m looking forward to seeing what the PliablePress themes, and the framework itself, will be like. It should be interesting.

Poll: What Do You Look For in a Premium Theme?

Jan 21, 2010 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

There is no shortage of “premium” WordPress themes nowadays, and their creators are fairly large in number as well. You have the monumental WooThemes, the bargain ThemeForest, and DIYthemes, the people behind the ever-popular Thesis theme, to name just a few.

Companies aside, what criteria do you usually use when looking for a commercial theme? Is price the most important factor? Is support critical? Do you want the PSD files, so you can use the theme as a starting point for your own design?

Take a minute to answer the poll. You can choose as many responses as necessary.

What do you look for in a "premium" theme?

  • The design! (90%, 9 Votes)
  • A backend that allows the theme to be modified with little effort (80%, 8 Votes)
  • A good starting point for a unique design (60%, 6 Votes)
  • Low price (50%, 5 Votes)
  • Good support (50%, 5 Votes)
  • Obscurity, so few others are using the same theme as me (50%, 5 Votes)
  • Original PSD files (50%, 5 Votes)
  • Other (please describe) (10%, 1 Votes)
  • A thriving community of customers (0%, 0 Votes)
  • A "theme club" (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 10

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If you are viewing this in a feed reader, you will have to click through to the original post to see the poll.

WooThemes Increases “Permanent 2-for-1″ Offer

Jan 7, 2010 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

WooThemes has taken their famous “Permanent 2-for-1″ offer and made it even better. A standard theme purchase now includes two extra themes instead of just one (making it a 3-for-1 deal). Developer packages, which include the PSD source files, include three extra themes.

That means you can now grab 3 Standard Package themes for only $70 and a whopping 4 Developer Package themes for $150.

I think that’s a pretty good deal for WordPress themes of the quality WooThemes usually releases.

WordPress Theme of the Month: LiveTwit

Jan 5, 2010 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

This month’s featured WordPress theme is LiveTwit by Templatic.

LiveTwit is a WordPress theme that isn’t for blogging. It’s primary focus is to make it dead-simple to create a “Twitterwall” like Helveti-Tweet or wpTweety. It pulls a live feed of data from the Twitter Search API, for whatever search term you specify, and dumps the Tweets onto the page.

The theme includes several color schemes, and it’s easy to swap out the logo through the backend.

So if you need a quick and easy way to set up a Twitterwall, this theme’s a good choice. It might make a good “coming soon” page for a heavily-anticipated website or product…

WordPress Theme of the Month: Glassical

Nov 16, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

This month’s featured WordPress theme is Glassical, once again brought to you by Smashing Magazine.

Glassical WordPress Theme

Continue reading →

WordPress Theme of the Month: Visiting Card

Sep 14, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 2 Comments

Famous designer TimVanDamme designed his mini site and everyone praised it a lot for unique, beautiful concept. Usually it happens when you are really active on social media sites, you blog less. And his design was perfect solution for those who have a domain name but don’t need/want much content on the website.

The concept has caught on of late, and I quite like the idea. If you’re looking to create something similar yourself, but you want a plug-and-play solution, check out the free Visiting Card theme by PremiumThemes.net.

visiting-card-theme

The theme puts your social media links (and links to your websites if you’re so inclined) front-and-center, while having dynamic tabs along the top for content such as an About page for contact details.

Are Premium WordPress Themes Going Out of Style?

Sep 11, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

There has been some interesting discussion about WPblogger about premium WordPress themes. The author of the original post says “Premium WordPress Themes are Dead.”

Ben Cook suggests that people aren’t really interested in buying an individual theme so much as a highly configurable theme that acts more like a framework. A foundation that they can build upon, tweaking it to look how they want through a backend menu. Essentially, Thesis.

Sure it’s nice that companies like iThemes keep turning out new themes, but they’re fighting a losing battle.

People don’t want to purchase a different theme for every new site they create or every time they want to redesign their site. We want a framework that allows us to make a vast array of design changes as quickly and easily as possible.

Personally, I don’t believe this to be the case. I’m not really a Thesis fan myself, preferring to build my sites’ themes “the real way.” I think people still want to buy themes for the design, not just for a tweakable platform. That’s not to say people don’t want customization, far from it. WooThemes is a prime example. Their themes are primarily design-oriented, but they have plenty of customization options in the backend, albeit less than Thesis. I believe that the two points will converge in the future, bringing more and more customization options to more design-oriented themes.

Though I wonder if frameworks like Hybrid and Thematic will gain similar customization options to Thesis, bringing about a similar result. With customization options in the core of a theme framework like Thematic, and a large community of child theme makers, you have the convergence point I predict, no?