Chromand - Desiging, Developing, and Marketing for the Interwebs

Developers and Designers have an old saying: “Don’t reinvent the wheel”. People shouldn’t waste their time re-coding things that have already been done. I toyed around with the idea of making a “Press++” theme for Wordpress, which would be a theme that would turn Wordpress into a more robust CMS, and add a lot of useful functionality.  Fortunetly, it turns out that wheel has already been invented, and it’s free!

The Options Theme is a free premium Wordpress theme availible from ThemeHybrid. It allows you to have up to 5 ‘blocks’ that make up your homepage (this doesn’t include the sidebar, we’ll get to that in a minute). These blocks range from the mundane, such as displaying full posts and excerpts, to allowed for tabbed browsing, a slick featured gallery, and photo and video galleries. It also includes other functionality for posts, such as adding thumbnail images.

The sidebar comes widget ready, along with a bunch of custom widgets for the sidebar. It comes with video and picture gallery options, it’s own built in ad management system, and even more tabbed browsing with a wide variety of options.

Options has it’s own sub-theme functionality, which is a very cool feature. This way you can lay a variety of looks over the framework options gives you. The initial theme comes with several of these already installed, and there are some more available on their site. It’s also not to hard to make your own themes. If you want a shortcut, you can always choose one of the defaults that closest matches what you are going for, copy it into a new folder, rename the stylesheet and fix the comments on the top, and you have a new sub-theme ready to go.

I feel a little bad calling this a ‘theme’ as it really does a lot more than that. This is a feature to add a ton of functionality to wordpress CMS, and is great if you want a magazine-style blog, which are all the rage these days.  However, all of these features can be kind of a double-edged sword, and the Options theme is not without it’s drawbacks. With all of these features, finding just the ones you want, getting the plug-ins that are sometime required, and getting them all layouted and customized just how you want them, it takes a lot of time to get everything set up.  Some customization also takes coding knowledge and followes some naming conventions that I thought were a little counter-intuitive, so I don’t think I would recommend this theme to the average joe who wants to blog, but doesn’t have any PHP/CSS expierience.

Having said all that, I still think this an invaluable tool to the designer/developer to have in their toolbox if they are doing work in WordPress. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of re-working FretFeed using this theme. I always it would do better in a magazine-style, and I think this will be perfect. I have to do quite a bit of editing on the old posts to get it all working properly, but I think it’ll be a much better looking site when it is all said and done.