WordPress looking better and better
WordPress used to look rather bland out of the box in the past with its default greenish template by Dave Shea. It’s not all bad, but it’s not particularly attractive either. There’re still a lot of sites which run with this default template and i always thought that it hurts the public perception of wordpress.
Site design quality took a surging rise when Michael Heilemann introduced his highly lauded, much ported kubrick theme for wordpress. From there, things started to improve vastly: Ryan Boren wrote that kubrick was an inspiration for the theme support which’ll be introduced with the release of wordpress v1.3. This new theme capability improves theme management for the enduser and gives designers better support for creating richer, more diversified templates. For information about theme creation for wordpress 1.3 this is a good starting point.
The themes becoming available aren’t quite up there with the best designs in the blogosphere yet, but they’re slowly getting there. Some of the better themes i’ve found and tried out on my test-install are mallow, manji and persian, all of which much better than anything i could possibly come up with. Judging from these excellent first efforts i’m thrilled to see what other gifted designers in the wordpress community will come up with in the near future, once 1.3 is officially released. Nonetheless i’m also somewhat reluctant to using a pre-made theme because i’m not yet willing to declare the form of personal web design dead.
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