Learn how to create a WordPress theme
If you are more of a designer than a developer than it can be pretty daunting to learn how to create a WordPress theme. I find the best way to do this is to work off of another creation. A great example is the default Kubrick WordPress theme.
The other way to easily learn how to create a WordPress theme is to download one of our blank themes. They have been released into the Public Domain* so you already have permission to download the theme(s) and use it, modify it, redistribute it, butcher it, etc. The best part of our blank themes is NO CREDIT link is required. YOU can take full credit* for your end creation.
Once you learn the basics of creating a WordPress theme you can go deeper into the science and learn how to take advantage of conditional tags as well as custom fields. We’ll talk more about that in another post.
Lastly, here are the download links for our blank WordPress themes:
2 column left sidebar: Live Preview - Download
2 column right sidebar: Live Preview - Download
3 column: Live Preview - Download
Our blank WordPress themes are the only themes here on Refueled Dot Net that are public domain. The rest of our themes are licensed under the GNU GPL license.
You can take full credit as long as you don’t download our blank themes and then turn around and re-release the blank themes as your own. Try to be creative with them.
June 11th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
If these themes are meant to help teach theme development, my suggestion is to add lots of comments to the theme files in order to help the would be theme developers understand the portions of code and their purpose.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Thanks for the tip Mark. (also, thanks for stopping by)
I’ll make those suggested changes.
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:23 am
First, thank you for all of your hard work. I just have one quick question; are these themes all widget ready?
Thanks again :)
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Yup, they are all widget ready. :)
July 28th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Some of the most clean, elegant and sophisticated designs I’ve come across. Nice work.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Thank you very much great job!
I’m using the 3-column theme. I have some questions.
1. In long posts there is shown only the first page, the other part totally disappeared. How can be it fixed?
2. The using of widgets in sidebars also causes a disappearing of its content (category,links,pages) and shows only the widget (for example, polls).
3. It is impossible to change header image through the Custom Image Header (Design).
There is used WP 2.6.
I would be very grateful if you could help to fix these problems.
Thanks in advance.
July 30th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
I really appreciate these, I am a designer and WordPress Challenged, thanks so much for the work and a great starting point!
August 13th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Very usefully for a noobie designer like me!
Thanks and greetings from Italy
September 17th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
any chance a matching blank bbpress theme is out there?
tia,
g
September 17th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
@Greg,
yup, I do plan on releasing matching blank themes for bbPress. I’ll try to release them this month, if not, look for them in October over at Theme Terminal.