Last weekend I was looking for an excuse to play around with JQuery, CSS3 and designing in general. After looking around for a bit I decided to make a more interactive version of the Theme Development Codex on WordPress Codex.

My version formats that list for better readability, adds checkboxes and counters so you can track your progress, editable labels, and so on.

You can also download a copy for your own use. Click on the image above (or here: WordPress Theme Development Checklist Tool) to check it out.

Any ideas, comments, bug reports, let me know in the comments area.

Immediately after wondering why there aren’t more modded premium themes, I set out to mod a theme myself. There were plenty of available themes to choose, but somehow I kept reconsidering this one theme by Darren Hoyt: Mimbo.

If there’s one thing I can tell you about modding a theme, it’s that it is very, very fun to do. Once you understand the coding style of the original author (which in my case was very easy to do thanks to Darren’s clean codes), you’re free to dream up what useful features you want to add to this already awesome theme. I immediately found myself looking into other great themes for ideas (took Widget areas from Thematic and Page Templates from Hybrid, for example) and eventually implemented them.

And this is why modding is such a nice idea: you can immediately go thinking about useful features to add instead of worrying about visual design, building the HTML/CSS from scratch, and so on.

Anyways, enough rambling.

This is where you can read about and download Pico WordPress theme. I intentionally include no screenshot or feature lists here, for everything you need to know about Pico is there, so do check it out.

That landing page does not have a comment area, though. So if you’d like to share your thoughts or have a question you can do it here. Thanks!

Sophia gets the honor of being one of the available themes for BuddyPress, so I go and do some CSS modification so it works better there.

If you’re using Sophia on standalone WordPress, the update includes non-BuddyPress specific CSS fixes too.

Download the update here.

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

Demo | Download

Installation

1. Download Thematic and upload it into your theme folder.
2. Download Sophia theme above and upload it into your theme folder.
3. 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!

I notice there are quite a lot of interest for A Simple Love, a child theme I made for the famous Thematic theme. So here you can get A Simple Love in three different color schemes: Mono, Green and Yellow version.

Preview

Monochrome | Green | Yellow

Downloads

Monochrome | Green | Yellow

These are separate themes and can be installed separately. Remember that you need to have Thematic installed in your themes folder too to get these child themes working.

Enjoy!

I love Thematic and I think it’s a lot of great things in one package. And here’s a little something I did.

A Simple Love is a minimalistic, lighthearted 3 columns Thematic child theme with dashes of light blue and dark pink here and there. The goal is to provide better readability, less visual clutter, and simply to be pleasing to look at.

Demo and Download

For the demo, check out WPLover with A Simple Love activated.

Grab your copy of A Simple Love this way!

Installation

To use this theme, simply upload both the latest version of Thematic and A Simple Love into the usual wp-content/themes/ directory. Go to Appearance within your WordPress dashboard and A Simple Love should be available there ready to be activated.

Thanks and Have Fun!

Let me know if you have any suggestions to this theme! In the meanwhile, you might also want to read Ian’s excellent child theme write up to learn more about this subject.

Alternate Color Schemes

Hey, here’s a monochrome, green and yellow version of this theme. Check them out!

Once upon a time, a good friend of mine designed an awesome, grunge-looking theme for her own blog. Now, she’s really productive and I know sooner or later she will change that theme with another one of her creation. Yet I loved the theme so much that I don’t want it to simply disappear once she’s done using it. And, being a WordPress geek, what better way for me to preserve it than by making it into a WP theme?

To keep a long story short, she eventually made another new design and generously allowed me to convert her old design and release it as a free, GPL-licensed WordPress theme.

So here it is, Our Rights WordPress theme. Here’s a demo version for you.

Bullet Points for the Lazy

• Tested with WordPress 2.5.
• Gravatar ready.
• Widget-ready sidebar.
• Valid CSS/XHTML.
• Tested in IE6Win, Firefox 2, Opera 9 and Safari 3.

Download

Download Our Rights WordPress Theme on WordPress Theme Directory.

Support

If you have any questions, comments, or even improvements for this theme, please use the comment form below to let me know.