Wordpress Naked has been put together by me as a simple Wordpress theme to assist developers that need to quickly implement a blog using Wordpress but don’t really have the time to spend looking under the hood in any detail or reading documentation when it comes to applying a custom theme (e.g. their clients’ design).
I’ve had to do this myself in the past and have usually started hacking apart one of the default themes but the results were not always as clean as I’d like. The aim with Naked is that a developer with an XHTML template that they’ve already developed can very quickly apply it to this no-frills theme with the minimum of fuss and research.
The main features of Naked are:
- Lightweight, semantic and validating XHTML
- As minimal as I can make it CSS to support the two column layout, which you can of course change in minutes to suit your CSS; I’ve commented the CSS to assist more in this regard
- Page navigation is two level horizontal unordered lists which you can easily change
- With an eye on SEO:
- The site title and strap line are H1 on the homepage and H4 on internal
- The HTML <title> contains the site name on homepage and the post title on internal pages
- The post titles are H2 on the homepage and H1 on their standalone pages
- Widget friendly
- Tested against WP 2.3 and 2.4-dev
- A ‘do whatever what ever you want with it’ licence. No links back to my site, or a need to credit me.
To take a look download (zip | tar.bz2) here. If you do use it then please drop a comment on this page to let me know. I also actively welcome suggestions for improvement.
If it turns out that WP Naked is not for you then you may also want to take a look at The Sandbox which is a much more comprehensive affair but may require a bit more of a learning curve to get going.
Edit 13/04/08: I recently noticed that Elliot Jay Stocks launched something similar soon after, albeit with a slightly different focus as he’s stripped all formatting out (where I purposely left some in to make the job of converting someone else’s template a quicker job). He’s posted it up here: Wordpress Starkers.
