Great Expectations: The Morning After Wordpress Theme

In the short history of Wordpress (the open source Blog software that powers Twigged.net) there are just a hand full of themes that have left an indelible mark on the Wordpress community and some of those include: Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick and K2 themes, Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme and more recently Scott’s Sandbox theme. Of course there are many others that have gained immense popularity (including the excellent themes of Brian Gardner, one of which Twigged happens to be using) but few can boast the same development potential as these.

Now most Wordpress themes end up falling under some sort of category. Tags, categories and generally taxonomy is the bedrock of blog structures. But it does breed a type of ‘box’ logic that I sometimes find contestable. Be that as it may, the classification of Wordpress themes is usually based on the theme’s column count, so that Kubrick is a two column theme for example, while Cutline and Sandbox open up 2-3 column possibilities. But as the Wordpress blogging platform develops and grows more complex at each new update, in line with user suggestions and demands, so does Wordpress theme functionality. And while Wordpress is usually associatied with ‘conventional’ blogging such as this blog for example, there has been a parallel development in using Worpdress to power far more ambitious projects and this is typically the realm of Ezines or online magazines.

The ezine Wordpress theme category is really in a league of its own, not least because magazines using Wordpress often have to hack the coding core to distribute posts and pages in a way that rises to the layout and distribution demands of a journal but also because there are simple only a few of them around. To date, most Wordpress ezine themes have been difficult to set up and offer little in the way of customization for amateur coders. With the exception of Eston Bond’s Gridlock theme there is really only Brian Gardner’sRevolution theme, but unfortunately that is not part of the open source Wordpress adventure, since it comes with a price tag.

But then came the Morning After! The answer to the holy grail of Ezine themes! Search no more people, it has arrived! And it’s arrived from India thanks to the brilliant work of Arun Kale. Just take a peek at the comment section for the post that announces this theme (it’s being released tomorrow by the way) to get a sense of the excitement and expectation surrounding this imminent theme release, it is actually quite thrilling to watch. If Arun delivers on the semantic coding front and the theme is suitably customizable then I suspect this will easily take top position in the Wordpress hall of themes (ezine category of course!). I for one am looking forward to this. Here’s a sneak preview:

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