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Archive for December 2008
2008 has been a massive year in the world of WordPress themes, with the emergence of a number of professional design houses selling premium themes, accompanied by a steady stream of quality free theme releases.
The year has seen fevered discussion surrounding the issue of premium themes and how they interact with the GPL licence associated with WordPress.
However, for most users of WordPress the biggest developments have been the improvements to the software’s interface and the release of richer, increasingly professional designs from both free and premium developers.
There’s been a great deal of innovation during the year, much of it coming from the premium space and leaking into free themes over time. For instance, many themes now come with custom administration panels that allow users to customise their theme from within the WordPress menus. Such a facility was basically unheard of at the start of 2008.
Here’s bestwpthemes.com’s selection of the best themes of 2008. There are 45 themes in all, divided between free and premium themes.
The best free WordPress themes of 2008
Typebased
Andrea
Charade
Revolution White Canvas
Revolution Album
Elegant Grunge
Carrington
Sirup
Equilibrium
Blass2
Upstart Blogger Swiss
Vostok
The Morning After
Brightness
Thematic
Monotone
MNML
Ocular Professor
Lightning
Portfolio
Prologue
Thunderbolt
The Unstandard
Olegario
Fontella
Overstand
Depo Skinny
Grid Focus
The best premium WordPress themes of 2008
Sharp
Thesis
Fresh News
Perfection
Mimbo Pro
Perfection Grunge
Vintage
Folio
Our Community
YourFolio
Credit Crunch
Over Easy
Papercut
VibrantCMS
ProudFolio
Travailler
Modularity
Note: There’s a chance not all of the above themes were released in 2008. Some may have been available in late 2007 but only come to my notice in 2008. Nonetheless, I believe they belong among a list of the best themes of 2008, as this is when they came to prominence.
December 23rd, 2008 | Features | 21 Comment
The Folio theme is designed as a platform for both a personal portfolio/showcase and an extremely stylish and contemporary blog.
However, the theme could easily serve simply a blogging function without the portfolio element if that’s the aim.
The theme’s homepage highlights your most recent featured project as well as posts in an easy to navigate format.
In the sidebar you will find Flickr photos being syndicated, a widgetized sidebar allowing room for easy additions, as well as a brief about section highlighting yourself.
This theme comes with 5 different color accent options.
Cost:
The Folio theme costs $US25.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
Note: The download link above is an affiliate link. If you purchase using this link, you’ll be helping to support bestwpthemes.com.
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | Comments Off
Our Community is a highly flexible WordPress theme that could easily serve to create magazine, community, or corporate websites.
This is a gorgeous 2/3-column theme making good use of images, including stylish typography and providing built-in ad space.
Features include:
- Threaded comments and paged comments supported.
- 2 widget-ready sidebars: one shows on the frontpage, while the other only shows for single-post pages.
- Custom admin menu, including control over ad banners, the number and types of posts displayed, frontpage display options and the ability to insert your own Google Analytics code.
- Drop down menu ( for categories)
- Featured post in main page.
- An image a post (recommended)
- Full PSD layout included.
- 2 different categories highlighted below the featured section.
Cost:
The Our Community theme costs $US30.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
Note: The download link above is an affiliate link. If you purchase using this link, you’ll be helping to support bestwpthemes.com.
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | Comments Off
YourFolio is a professional-looking WordPress theme designed to offer an online portfolio of work, as well as a personal blog.
Both of those features are beautifully integrated on the dynamic homepage, showing off the latest additions to both your portfolio and your blog.
Thr theme has 5 different stylesheets to choose from, allowing the user different color and font options.
Cost:
The YourFolio theme costs $US25.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
Note: The download link above is an affiliate link. If you purchase using this link, you’ll be helping to support bestwpthemes.com.
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 1 Comment
Elegant Grunge is just what the title suggests: an elegant two-column WordPress theme with some grungy overtones.
This theme is “unwashed yet crisp”, according to its author. It’s stylish but still very simple and keeps the focus on the most important thing: the content.
Features include:
- Automatic surrounding of all images with a frame packed with eye-candy that makes images really pop out.
- A ‘photoblog’ tag page that displays entries in a photoblog style.
- A widget to display thumbnails from latest/random photoblog entries.
- A custom page template that allows complete customisation of the sidebar: Supply a list of tags to automatically display related posts, and specify any text/html to be displayed.
- Per-page and per-post configuration to turn on and off automatic image framing, among other things, and a global configuration interface – turn on/off the RSS link, set your own copyright message, or add your own extra header content – like adding a rel=alternate link to your Twitter feed.
- A ‘feature’ footer that you can add widgets to.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 2 Comment
Carrington is a complex, multi-layered WordPress theme that looks good out of the box and offers a multitude of advanced customisations for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper.
The theme is focused on creating a quality structure for your website and offers easy custom development.
Carrington won’t be for everyone, because it has something of a learning curve to figure out how to make customisations. However, once you make the leap you can use this theme to create very flexible, powerful websites.
Features include:
- Flexible and powerful Carrington template system
- Rich, semantic markup (with Sandbox CSS classname support)
- Tasty styling and typography
- Page and category navigation menus
- AJAX loading of posts in archive lists (optional)
- AJAX loading of comments (optional)
- Theme abstraction and organization like none other
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | Comments Off
The Sirup theme for WordPress features an elegant and functional magazine-style layout; with some tweaking it’d make a gorgeous website.
The styling is distinctive but not particularly attractive out of the box; however, it would be simple to use this theme as a starting point to create your own distinct site, simple by tweaking the colours in its stylesheet.
The theme is fixed-width, features valid code, supports Gravatars and sidebar widgets.
You can customize the appearance of your site with an options page inside the WordPress administration, including:
- Choosing between a magazine or blog layout for the homepage;
- Setting which categories appear on the frontpage;
- Setting the amount of comments / posts / tags to show underneath;
- Choosing whether to have a lead story;
- Setting a default width for thumbnails;
- Changing fonts, sizes etc.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 2 Comment
Equilibrium is a gorgeous, minimalist magazine-style WordPress theme making excellent use of images to highlight recent posts on the front page.
This is an ultra-clean and simple theme but has all the bases covered in terms of navigation, style, widgets and WordPress 2.7 support.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 2 Comment
Blass2 is a minimalist two-column WordPress theme with stylish horizontal navigation, lovely use of whitespace and crystal clear typography.
Blass2 has an administration panel, making it easier to customise. It’s widgetized but comes with a default sidebar all set up and ready to use.
The theme uses no images, reducing traffic and loading time.
It also includes an archives page set up and ready to use.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 2 Comment
Upstart Blogger Swiss is a simple, elegant magazine-style theme with international typographic style and all the focus on the writing.
This is a minimalist theme, although adding images above each post excerpt on the homepage would be a simple matter and would add a lot of impact and style to your site.
The theme has a well-defined structure, two columns and features mouseover highlight effects.
Demo and download:
Demo
Download
December 23rd, 2008 | Themes | 1 Comment
