I was planning to release this free WordPress theme for a long time now. I stopped myself from doing it because of the changing trends. Nowadays, a lot of people are preferring magazine-styled themes, themes with super-duper slide shows, nifty effects and all that jazz!

But I am sure that there still exists a class of people who admire simple, minimalistic, and aesthetic themes. This was the sole reason of Blog Oh! Blog being famous in the first place. So, my new theme “Ultima” is dedicated to all those simple-minded bloggers and authors.

This is a soft-colored, rounded theme that totally aims at content and nothing else. This 2-column theme is all about the “complexity of simple things”… Enjoy!

This is a plug and play theme. Nothing much to do except configure the subscribe form, twitter and facebook links. You can do this by editing the socials.php file in the theme folder.

Please don’t forget to submit some feedback as it’s very valuable to me!

A very Happy New Year to all my readers!

For the new year, I am glad to announce the release of a new WordPress theme called “Impress”. This is a minimalistic, red-colored theme with automatic thumbnails, advertising space and a clean layout.

Thumbnails are used from the default ones that WordPress generates when you upload an image with the post. The theme uses jQuery for animated menu and sidebar. Impress has been tested with Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari without any problems.

Setting up the Theme

This is a plug & play theme. All you have to do is extract & place the theme into your wp-content/themes folder and apply it. Btw, it only took me 3 hours to make this theme (Design + Code)

Test & Download

This is a crisp rounded theme that comes with lots of features like built in drop-down menus, Feedburner settings (RSS and Subscribe by e-mail), Twitter, Tabs for Popular/Recent posts, Featured post section, 3 sections to pull posts from different categories on home page, auto generated thumbnails (for both home and the single entry page), threaded comments, widgetized sidebars and 3 widgetized sections on the bottom. On top of all this, Urbane comes with integrated theme options that let you specify categories to use on the home page, configure your feedburner/twitter settings and much more.

The theme has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari and works without any problems.

Setting up the theme

• Download and extract the theme. Place it in wp-content/themes section of your WordPress installation.
• Setup the different categories/theme options on the home page by going to wp-admin -> Appearance -> Urbane Options
• For the thumbnails, just upload images to your posts (no need to insert them). The scripts will make thumbnails automatically.
• To enable threaded comments, go to wp-admin -> Settings -> Discussion -> Enable Threaded comments

Demo & Download

What Next?

Just provide your valuable feedback, and if possible, don’t remove my link from the footer.

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

Using the theme

Download, extract the zip and place the theme folder in your wp-content/themes folder. Activate the theme and it will be ready to use. For the featured post on top, you will have to set up the category through the Bookish admin options. For the image, you will have to use custom field called “featuredimage” and upload an image of size 240×160 pixels with your featured post.

Test & Download

Simple Paper comes with a unique design (left-aligned), fixed menu, stylized comments, paginated posts and easily editable CSS. The this is fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers without any problems.

How to Install Simple Paper

• Download the zip file and extract the contents to your desktop.
• Upload the plugin called wp-pagenavi (in the plugins folder) to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it through plugins section of the admin panel.
• Upload the theme to your wp-content/themes directory and activate the theme through the appearance section of the admin panel.

Demo & Download

TEST RUN | DOWNLOAD Simple Paper

In case you decide to use Simple Paper, don’t forget to leave a comment!

“Excellence is not a skill. Its an attitude.” So, give your blog some attitude by applying our all new WordPress theme – Excellence. This is a green-colored theme that comes with validated CSS/XHTML code, 125×125 banner space, Sidebar Tabs, Widgetized sidebars and a cute navigation menu. The theme is free of cost and comes under a Creative Commons License (that allows you to make changes and use this theme for personal use, without removing the footer copyright link).

Excellence has been tested with Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Opera browsers without any problems. The theme is also compatible with WP 2.7 and above.

How to Install?

The theme does not use any plugins so its pretty much plug and play. Just download and extract the zip file to your desktop. Upload the theme folder (excellence) to your wordpress directory under wp-content/themes and apply the theme by going to the Appearance section of the Wp-admin.

Demo & Download

TEST RUN | DOWNLOAD

Feedback

Your feedback on the theme will be appreciated and it will help me in future theme designs.

To mark the beginning of year 2009, I am releasing a bright & colorful free WordPress theme – ClearPress. This is a unique WordPress theme which you will not find anywhere on the Internet. The unique feature about this theme is that it divides the blog posts into three separate columns. So, if you have set your blog to show 9 posts on the home page, they will be divided into 3 columns consisting of 3 posts each.

The theme also features a pull-down sidebar which is totally unobtrusive and contains three widgetized sidebars. ClearPress is Gravatar-ready, Image Gallery ready, and consists of beautifully styled comments and archive pages.

ClearPress has been tested on IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers without any problems. The CSS for the theme is commented and easy to modify for any WordPress user.

How to Install?

All you have to do is extract the theme folder (clearpress) into your wp-content/themes directory and apply the theme by going to wp-admin -> Design.

Changing the Logo Image

I have provided the logo.psd file which is located inside the images folder of the theme. If you want to change the logo (which is obvious as it says “Clearpress” right now), you can open this file in Adobe Photoshop, modify it and then export as logo.png. Replace the existing logo.png with your new one.

Demo & Download

TEST RUN | DOWNLOAD

I hope you like this theme. Don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments!

Following the footsteps of the much successful theme Statement, comes another free WordPress theme from Blog Oh! Blog called – “Digital Statement”. This can also be called as Version 2.0 of the Statement theme because it takes all the code and converts it into a modern, more visually appealing, and with better functionality.

This version of the theme has been created by the owner of Neowster.com who gladly gave it to me for a free public release. With neat stuff like featured posts’ slide show, a nice navigation (for both pages/sub-pages and categories), content tabs, Twitter posts, site navigation, this theme is a winner

How to set up Digital Statement?

This theme makes use of plugins and custom scripts that have to be installed before you start using this theme. Here are the steps that will help you set up the theme properly :-

• When you download and extract the theme’s zip file, you will see a plugins folder along with the theme. Install and activate all plugins in the package to your wp-content/plugins directory.
• To setup twitter, go to http://twitter.com/badges/html, copy the javascript to the footer.php file in the theme folder, replacing lines 58 – 59
• This theme has a featured component (top right) which can pull posts and display them as a neat slide show along with corresponding images (done through custom fields). The posts are pulled from a particular category which can be specified in the gallery.php file of the theme. Open gallery.php file and change the category ID (cat=) in line 14 :-

  <?php query_posts('showposts=5&cat=2');?>

  For the slide show images, you will have to make a custom field with each post in the category with the key => “gallery_image” and value will be the upload path of the image.

  Get more information here. Also, remember that you will at least need two minimum posts (with custom field set) before the slide show will work properly.

• This theme also features a login box sliding panel on the top. For the login box to appear in the panel, you need to go to Admin > Settings > Membership > and check the “Anyone can register”.
• For the thumbnail images next to the posts on the index.php file, you will have to create a custom field called “Image” with every post.
• In order to display the “About” section on the right sidebar, your admin email will need to be associated with gravatar, and you will need to fill up the “Biographical Info” in the Admin > Users section.
• Finally, setup flickrRSS (a plugin is used to accomplish this) to link to your Flickr account. Set it to display 10 square images from Flickr.com. For the 11th image, it is a custom setup which you can edit in footer.php on line 16.

This theme has been tested on WordPress 2.6, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox without any problems. (As a tribute to Obama being the new American President, I have used his photos for the theme testing. If you don’t like him, please don’t feel offended He is the new president after all…)

Demo & Download

TEST RUN | DOWNLOAD

What next?

Well, let me know if you like this new theme and do NOT forget to take part in the ongoing contest

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone – “George Elliot”

Blog Oh! Blog is pleased to offer the community yet another free WordPress theme called “Angel”. The theme uses a soothing White color base with subtle Grey, rounded corners and a lovely tiled background which will appeal to anyone who cares about beauty

Salient features of this theme :-

• Minimalistic Design
• Sidebar DOM tabs
• A unique layout that highlights your most recent post
• Beautifully Styled comments
• Widgetized Sidebars
• Integrated Gravatars
• CSS/XHTML validated
• and more…

How to install the theme?

• Download the angel.zip file and extract it on your desktop.
• This theme uses a plugin for displaying Gravatars next to your comments. The plugin is included in a sub-folder called “Plugins” in the theme folder (you will see it when you extract the files).
• Copy the gravatar.php plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder in the wordpress installation and activate it.
• Now copy the “Angel” theme folder to wp-content/themes in the wordpress installation.
• Finally activate the theme from wp-admin -> design section.

This theme has been tested with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers and no bugs have been observed.

Why have you named the theme as “Angel”?

Because, Angels are everywhere

Do you need feedback on this theme or do I just take it and run away?

For me to continue making better themes in the future, your feedback is necessary. So say what you have to in your comments

Enough talking, now hand it over

TEST RUN | DOWNLOAD

The theme is very small in size (58Kb only) and loads very quickly. It is also SEO optimized and has been tested with Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Opera browsers.

How to install this theme?

• You should have WordPress installed and ready either at your local host or on your paid hosting
• Download the zip file for this theme. Extract the theme folder and upload it to /wp-content/themes/ in your WordPress installation.
• Log in to your WordPress admin panel, go to the “design” section and click on “Portfolio Press” theme to apply it.
• Check your blog for the theme change.

Demo & Download Portfolio Press

Test Run | Download

If you like the theme or want to leave feedback in general, please leave a comment. They are the inspiration that keeps me designing new themes for the community.