4 WordPress Themes to Take your Blog to the Next Level

I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for several years, and have never paid much attention to all the themes available. But if content is king, aesthetics/ease of use is queen, and we all know which is most important in chess.

A few months ago I invested in the thesis theme-slash-framework, which provides a way to create custom functions that don’t require editing of the core WordPress code. This makes upgrades trivial, and it is easy to debug errors. Beyond the development benefits, the Thesis layout is attractive, and can be seen only slightly modified on many WordPress blogs.

Over the weekend I attended Denver WordCamp, and was introduced to a few more impressive themes. Matt Mullenweg pointed out the beautiful Monotone theme. Ideal for photoblogs (and geeks with no eye for design), Monotone modifies the color scheme of each blog post based on the first image of the post. Every single post therefore has a unique look. I don’t even have a camera, but this theme has me wanting to set up a photoblog just from the sheer elegance of it.

Matt also mentioned the Twitter-inspired Prologue theme. Evidently the folks at Automattic use a password-protected version of a blog run on Prologue to keep track of their tasks and activities. Who needs yammer? It seems to me that this theme is best used for a multi-author blog, so I’m wracking my brain for a project I can use it on. The theme certainly seems best suited to short (twitter-like) posts, so I wouldn’t necessarily want to advocate it as the sole blog theme for an organization. But what if a prologue-themed blog were to serve as an aggregator of posts everywhere, potentially with shortened URLs (similar to a tumblog)? I think there is certainly a possibility there…

And I would be remiss not to mention the amazing Carrington ‘CMS Theme Framework’ by Alex King and the guys at Crowd Favorite. Carrington isn’t a typical theme that you simply drop into your WordPress install. Rather than botching an explanation of my own about what makes Carrington special, I’ll refer to the docs:

Carrington is an attempt to better abstract WordPress theme organization, and simplify commonly needed theme functionality.

Theme functionality is broken up into thoughtfully crafted abstractions to enable customizations at different levels (the loop, the post/page content, comments, etc.) and a context-aware hierarchical template override system that chooses which template to be used for each segment of the theme.

While the thesis theme has a single “Custom Functions” file to add special functions and override default WordPress behavior, Carrington introduces a templating approach with an amazing level of granularity, allowing for a robust (and easily portable) system. There was one question in the presentation about ease of upgrade and backwards compatibility with wordpress, and Alex did recommend some testing to ensure compatibility before performing upgrades. This is something that Thesis appears to handle very well, since it is much closer to the original WordPress code.

Another sign that this is not just a WordPress theme is the recent release of Carrington JAM, where JAM stands for Just Add Markup. The core of Carrington is the way the files are structured and elements are externalized, not how the data is actually presented. As the documentation states, the intended audience is for developers only!

It is estimated that 25% of all Internet users visited a WordPress blog in the past month. With hundreds of possible themes, do you not owe it to yourself and your readers to provide them with something beyond the standard layout? If you expect a visitor to invest some time reading your site, should you not also invest in giving them something special?

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