Elegant Minimalism with Sophia, a Thematic Child Theme
Sophia is an elegant, minimalistic child theme for Ian Stewart’s Thematic. It’s a two column theme (right sidebar) and is based on the latest version of Thematic (0.9.5.1 as of this post).
Wait. Are You Sure You Want to Install This Theme?
Note that there’s no fancy graphics to distract your readers. No big ugly Twitter/Subscribe/whatever buttons. No Web 2.0 gradients. No abstract, colorful backgrounds. No intricately drawn icons.
Nope.
Sophia is all about your content.
It wraps your ideas in tasteful typography and minimal decorations, then it gets out of the way completely.
Choose Sophia if you believe in substance over style.
Choose Sophia if you need the least friction between your reader and your writings.
Choose Sophia if you want your writing to be the main showcase, the way it should be.
Demo and Download
Installation
- Download Thematic and upload it into your theme folder.
- Download Sophia theme above and upload it into your theme folder.
- Go into your WordPress Dashboard, select Appearance and activate Sophia.
If you don’t have any idea how to upload a new theme, here’s a tutorial for you.
A Work in Progress
Sophia is a work in progress, as there are some edge cases not yet covered (some obscure CSS stylings, among other things). Feel free to comment and share your ideas below.
Also, you might want to subscribe to wplover to get further updates about Sophia. To be truthful you will probably be deluged with many WordPress-related posts before you get that update, but it’s not like it’s a bad thing, no?
Anyways, enjoy!
Nice thematic child theme you got there! :D …it’s nice having more people support the use of child theme
Oh, it’s sooooo preeeetty. :D
[...] Sophia is a minimal and elegant Thematic child theme, designed by WPLover. [...]
[...] style.css in the sophia folder. Download the Sofia child theme over [...]
Great child theme :)
Beautiful work… I love Thematic and what you’ve done with it. I am in the process of combining my portfolio site with my blog and will have to link to you the final results.
Thanks for your hard work!
Lovely theme. Just FYI, I notice that I have two searches for some reason (even after removing the widge from the sidebar; and, the Pages work wonderfully from the top nav but don’t seem to recognize parent/child relationships in the sidebar.
Thanks again for the lovely child theme.
About the Search box? Nevermind. :)
[...] Sophia [...]
Just switched my site (after 3 years of the same theme) to Sophia. Thank you.
I’m in the process of making personalizations of my own, and I need help for a problem I can’t resolve.
In Sophia, you include a list of tags on the main blog page at the end of a post. However, the tag list is omitted on the single post page. I would like to add it to my layout of a single post page, but I’m not sure where that is being called in either Sophia or Thematic.
Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Also, I’d like to add a 0.5em line space between paragraphs in the comments so that they read more easily. However, I can’t find the source of the “comment-content” div class that controls that display. I’d like to add a CSS call (p + p { margin-top: 0.5em; } ), but I don’t know where to put it given that the div class doesn’t seem to exist anywhere in the stylesheet.
Thanks for the help. Have a great day.
Hi DLE,
to add the tag back into the single post, here’s what you do.
First, open Sophia’s functions.php file. Next, do a search for
and go to the first result (should be around line 51). Make a new line after it and add this:
That should do the trick.
Now, about adding a new line, you can simply add:
.comment-content p + p { margin-top: 0.5em; }inside Sophia’s style.css. Put that in the end of the file to be safe.
With CSS it doesn’t matter if a class/ID/whatever doesn’t exist yet, you can always add it yourself into the stylesheet.
I hope that helps!
Hafiz,
Thank you so much! Both suggestions worked great.
Thank you for being a blessing to the WordPress community by providing excellent themes and support.
Now that WordPress 3.0 is out, are there any problems we need to look out for with the Sophia 0.9 or with Thematic 0.9.6.2?
WordPress 3 should play well with themes made for previous version (otherwise many of them will be broken!).
I’ve just checked the Thematic release notes as well, no issue as best as I can tell.