The minimal WordPress Theme that I have been working on and talking about for the past few months has finally been released. Version 0.1 is available for download now at Papertree Themes.
What is it and a couple of quick notes. Charlene is a minimal, two column WordPress theme with minimal but useful options. It was born from a design that I put together quite awhile ago for a personal WP site. The original design was a spark of inspiration after viewing the brochure for Die Neue Typography in the book Grid Systems by: Kimberly Elam. It was built on framework that I have assembled over time for both personal and business use, allowing me to cut down some of my development time and concentrate on two things that I enjoy which are design and architecture.. (Please see credits & inspiration in the readme.html file included). Charlene is not meant to be a framework itself and I struggled with whether or not to release it with all the little extras included, but decided that going ahead with them would be useful to some.
Anyhow this is about the framework behind it, it’s about the theme. This is the first version and also my first public theme release so going ahead with it has been a bit nerve racking, but I realized that I could spend months finding things to add, take away and fix. Procrastinating and delaying the release. So I pushed myself to just let it go and await feedback, good or bad. It will undergo changes and I am sure, like the framework I use, that I will spot fixes that need to be made.
I spent quite a bit of time testing and retesting the theme, it has also been checked in modern browsers. Sorry didn’t check IE6 although I imagine that we are good to go there I can’t guarantee it. If by chance you find and issue and want to take the time to fix it feel free to forward the changes and I will add theme to a future update.
Other than that I look forward to hearing what people have to say. Check out the theme, the notes and some beginning documentation at papertreedesign.com/themes/
Excellent theme, I waited a year to find such a theme. Any idea how to add a third column?
Thanks LB – I truly appreciate the kind words. It should actually be pretty easy to add a third column with a little bit of css. If you take a look at the sidebar or
#secondaryyou will see that it is actually split into#leftand#right. On the back end that would be widget area Main Sidebar and Secondary sidebar respectively. So technically you should be able to increase the width of the page which is currently 820px (say to 960px). Then increase the width of your#secondaryto let’s say (440px) then float your#leftand#rightleft and right respectively at 200px width which will give you three columns. That is just an example of course you can modify the width of your columns including the primary to whatever you like. Let me know if that gets you on the right track.Thank you for the fast answer, I will show you the results soon
No problem, glad to help. Definitely looking forward to seeing the results. Thanks!
I love using this theme, but I have a little problem. My posts are not automatically cut off by the ‘continue reading’, my posts do not appear full cut ‘readmore’ was, how do I fix this?