Getting Creative, Responsive & “Trimming The Fat” At WPExplorer
As you may know at WPExplorer we’ve gained quite a bit of popularity from the Free WordPress themes we offer. We have loads of free themes….so many, that it’s been hard to keep up with them. But have no fear, we’ve finally gotten around to it and we’re giving our free WordPress themes a makeover!
Theme Updates & Trimming The Fat
First of all we will be discontinuing some of our less popular free themes. We’re sad to have to let some of them go but it’s for the best. With less themes to stay on top of we can update all of our themes much faster. And that’s just what we’re doing. Plus, we’ll eventually be making new themes 😉
We’re going to be updating the free themes to include new and necessary features. One of the changes we’re excited about is making all of our free themes responsive. Here’s a list of the things to expect in the upcoming theme updates
- Responsive/fluid designs
- CSS3 menus instead of SuperFish
- Options Framework integration and new theme options
- Custom post type plugins (where necessary) – so when you switch themes you can keep your posts in the dashboard.
- HTML5 layouts
- Proper script loading
- No more built-in shortcodes (support for Symple Shortcodes)
- Availability of themes on Creative Market
- Overall improved design & functionality
Availability on Creative Market
In addition to revamping our free WordPress themes we will also be making them available for purchase on the Creative Market. Why offer free themes on a marketplace?
Our themes will be available for purchase for a small fee for those not looking to subscribe to our Free membership, those who are simply nice and want to support us, those who are using the themes for commercial purposes and want to give back for our hard work or those who require sample-data.xml files.
Bug Reporting (coming soon)
After we update our free themes we’ll be creating a bug report system. We know how important it is to keep WordPress themes up to date and we haven’t been keeping up with our free themes. With a bug report system in place all of our users can let us know if they run into a problem. We want to provide you with well coded themes and this is one way to ensure that we do.
Fresh & Clean Theme Re-Launched
In case you didn’t already know, our first update is already done! We’ve updated Fresh & Clean for you. We’ve give the theme a fresh coat of paint and added some new features. Most notably we’ve added a new theme options panel.
The Fresh & Clean theme has been pretty popular for WordPress.org users and also for WordPress.com users. Unfortunately the theme was removed from WordPress.com by the Automattic team simply because at WPExplorer we promote ThemeForest themes that are not 100% GPL. We don’t think this is really fair for the users as we weren’t getting any benefits from having the theme on WP.com..So, the new version is only available for self-hosted WordPress users – sorry ;(
In the new theme panel you can control functions at the heart of the theme. For Fresh & Clean, this includes options for a custom logo, custom copyright, Social Icons in the header (AddThis, Behance, Blogger, Delicious, Deviantart, Digg, Dopplr, Dribbble, Evernote, Facebook, Flikr, Forrst, GitHub, Google, Grooveshrk, Instagram, Lastfm, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, PayPal, Picasa, Posterous, Reddit, ShareThis, Skype, Soundcloud, Spotify, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddler, Vimeo, Virb, Windows, WordPress, YouTube, Serply, RSS, and Mail), and options to customize the homepage slider.
Hopefully we will be able to update more of our themes in the upcoming weeks, so get excited & stay tuned!
Thumbs up guys.
Good stuff and good timing, looking forward to the responsive makeovers.
Did Themeforest just announced they now support 100% GPL themes? If so, can your theme get back to the WP Repo? Just wondering.
ThemeForest is 100% GPL now, however, it is optional. Since not all authors have gone full GPL and at WPExplorer we share themes that are not 100% GPLP (because they are still great themes ) WP.com won’t allow any free theme created by us to be on their site.