Ian Stewart of ThemeShaper fame has joined Automattic—the parents company of brands like WordPress, Intense Debate, Akismet, and Gravatar—founded by Matt Mullenweg. As a result, Stewart has decided to make his own “child themes” from the WordPress theme framework ThemeShaper available for download free of charge.
If you’re unfamiliar with ThemeShaper or theme frameworks in general, they work by creating a sort of generic template for a theme, on top of which different sub-themes or child themes can be applied. ThemeShaper is a little bit different from The Thesis Theme for WordPress, the framework we used here at ReadyMadeWeb and most strongly recommend to new bloggers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth checking out, especially considering the price.
One interested aspect of Stewart being hired by Automattic is the distinct possibility that WordPress will begin to create house-brand themes or incorporate some of the ThemeShaper ideas into a baked-in framework for a future version of WordPress. While this could be seen as a good thing given that many WordPress sites needlessly suffer from bad SEO thanks to poorly coded themes, it may also hurt the theme and theme framework marketplace, which currently benefits from a huge amount of competition between fantastic designers.
Whether you’re a creating a new web video comedy series or filming a series of panel discussions at a professional conference, you’ll want to display your handiwork on your own site and not rely on clunky and barely customizable account pages from services like YouTube or even ReadyMadeWeb’s beloved Blip.TV. Thankfully some brilliantly talented designers have made a plethora WordPress themes that will have you running your own spectacular-looking video site in no time.
Jason Schuller’s Press75 makes some of the most polished video themes out there, and that’s why they’re first on our list of video theme designers. Press75’s Video Elements, Video Flick, On Demand, and TV Elements themes are easily customizable and would make a great showcase for any set of videos.
All of these themes require you to be running WordPress 2.8 or above and require that your server be running a minimum of MySQL 5 and PHP 5 with GD Support enabled. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, Press75 provides a free server requirements plugin to check if your setup is ready for one of these gorgeous designs.
As a frequent use of Press75 themes, I’ve gone through a lot of Schuller’s code and I’ve been impressed by the meticulously crafted themes he’s put together. From their simplified installation to the rock-solid coding, you can’t go wrong with Press75.
As their names suggest, Object, Groovy Video, and WooTube are video themes that aren’t vying for the same market as their gun-metal gray competition. These video themes are light, creative, and still get the job done when it comes to functionality.
Over the years I’ve built a lot of WordPress sites using themes from the good folks at Woo Themes and I’ve been especially impressed by their level of support and the very active community of users who have filled their support forums with answers to nearly every customization question you could imagine. That sort of thriving community is a big reason to go with Woo.
It’s probably safe to say that most WordPress sites are used for talking about the news or displaying video, right? Well, those are the two concentrations of Quommunication, which produces exactly two themes, one for news and one for video. Their video theme, aptly titled “Video,” is a very simple wrapper from your embeddable videos.
For those of you producing videos in dozens of categories, this theme probably won’t get the job done. But, if you’re a film student or film professional looking to build a portfolio site, this theme is a real winner because of its simplicity. Users won’t be confused about which video is next in a series or how to switch to another series thanks to the straight-forward nature of the sign.
If you can get beyond the logo of StudioPress’s Tubular theme—it looks like the font used in the credit sequences of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but more, well…tubular—you’ll see that the rest of the theme is quite attractive and functional. This theme looks like the black brushed-metal of a high-end home theater component and would be a great frame for music videos or short films.
StudioPress also produces about a dozen other non-video themes that are worth checking out if you’re also building a traditional blog or a more image-centered magazine-style site.
If you’re a WordPress user and you haven’t heard of Thesis, the innovative theme by DIYthemes, you should definitely check it out. Thesis may not be the most striking theme you’ve ever seen, but Thesis isn’t about design, it’s about creating an innovative framework for others to build upon.
That framework makes modifying and updating a theme easy by localizing all the customizations into two files, a custom functions file and a custom CSS file. Accomplishing this miracle is made possible through the use of hooks, a series of place holders within the framework code. Custom code can then be inserted into the framework using this hooks as points of reference.
All of this results in customizations that are future-proof. When other themes are updated—either to introduce new features or to keep up with new releases of WordPress—all of the files are released. These updates ship with all new files, the same files that you or a designer had spent hours customizing. That means that you must redo all the modifications you made to the header, footer, post index, individual post page, sidebar displays, and any other files touched by your artistic vision.
Thesis avoids all of this duplication of work by making the upgrade process as simple as can be. Just download the new version of Thesis and copy your customization files—all two of them—into the “custom” folder contained within the theme’s folder.
These ease of use means that DIYthemes release updates more frequently than many theme designers, resulting in a very feature-rich experience. For example, basic design changes like the number and size of columns, font properties, ordering of elements, and other such options can all be changed using the options menu, rather than modifying code. This empowers even non-programmers to craft a Thesis-themed WordPress site into something they can really call their own.
To see some great examples of how customization works with Thesis, visit Matt Langford’s post “10 Ways to Customize Thesis and Enhance Your Blog” at MattFlies.com.
If you’re using the DISQUS comment system for your website or blog you may have some styling changes you’ve always wanted to make, but haven’t figured out exactly how to do so. Thanks to Adam Karas—the author of the only comprehensible guide on styling DISQUS—you no longer have to live a with a half-styled site.
Karas makes this very easy, but I thought I would add a note for anyone using The Thesis Theme for WordPress. Thesis will jive with this very easily, so long as you paste the header code into the “Header Scripts” box on the Thesis Options page. Then, simply create a disqus-form.css file in the Thesis “Custom” folder where your custom.css and custom-functions.php file reside.
That’s it, you’re done.
