Oh I love clean WordPress themes

After my recent post questioning the future of free, quality themes for WordPress, I decided to re-familiarize myself with what’s available and also discover a theme or two for use on an upcoming side project.

Ask and ye shall receive, it seems. A couple days ago Weblog Tools Collection posted one of their common theme release updates, and this one included “Empty Canvas” from Rubiqube.

I’m tiring a bit on complex theme frameworks, and love the idea of a nice, basic canvas with clean typography to draw a new design on. What I also like about Empty Canvas is I can see myself converting my personal blog (now on Thesis) over to it as is, perhaps with a tweak or two in the header – it’s just refreshing to look at, and under the covers it has none of the complexity (and, of course, none of the admin features) of some of the more popular premium themes on the market today.

I’m looking forward to trying out Empty Canvas on any upcoming project – I’ll share here how it turns out.

Related posts with the LinkWithin plugin

I’ve long been a fan of “related posts” plugins for any blog – they help hook your readers in by providing a logical and hopefully relevant next step deeper into your site. I’ve also long been a fan of effective use of images in a blog to keep things visually interesting. So how about combining the two?

Enter the LinkWithin plugin, which I just discovered this week and have been playing with on a couple of sites. It’s simple yet effective – it creates a list of related posts with autogenerated thumbnails of an image within each post. You can see the results in the image above (or, for now, below this post).

Pros: Very clean and simple, no frills, seems to create relevant posts.
Cons: So simple, there are no real customization or admin options. As far as I can tell, if you want to change the # of posts displayed you need to do a complete re-download and install of the plugin as the options appear to be custom set at download.

If you tend to include an image in each post, and are looking for a new take on displaying relevant posts, consider giving this one a try.

Are free WordPress themes a dying breed?

To paraphrase a Mony Python sketch “We’re not quite dead yet!” But some days it sure seems that way.

A couple years back, the idea of “premium” themes for WordPress was still relatively new, and it seemed like most of the truly creative work around WordPress themes was published free. A few premium – read: for pay – themes were around in various forms, but they didn’t dominate the conversation. Personally I obsessed with forever-in-beta K2, and hacked that thing to oblivion on my personal blog at least a dozen different ways.

Then Thesis* came along (*no affiliate links here), and the WordPress world was never the same. While others were first out the gate, once Brian and Chris showcased how much money was to be had via a strong premium theme and a rocking affiliate program, the flood was on.

Premium theme vendors are now so common, and their products so commonplace, that it’s as if a light switch was thrown on the WordPress community and it became the norm for self-hosted WordPress users to pay for their themes. (If you host on WordPress.com, you may not have even noticed)

For theme developers the shift to premium was obvious – why invest a huge amount of work in a free theme (except as a traffic hook to upsell to your premium version, of course) if you could spend that time building something you’d actually get paid, potentially handsomely, for? It’s hard to argue with that line of thinking – many premium themes obviously reflect huge amounts of work by the designers and developers, and if there is a way for them to be compensated for it, why not give it a shot?

It’s also hard to argue, to my eye, that the quality of WordPress themes (free and premium) in aggregate hasn’t improved dramatically in the past few years. I firmly believe a large part of that is due to very talented designers investing their efforts into premium themes.

And many premium themes are just stellar, either in design or code – I’m obviously a big fan of Thesis, have built sites on StudioPress (great for magazine/community sites), and am furiously brainstorming some excuse to build a video-based site using something from Press75. I recommend premium themes continually.

But with all the focus on premium, I realized I’ve lost touch with the state and quality of free WordPress themes. Turning to Smashing Magazine, purveyor of great mega lists such as this, I found: 100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes for 2009.

There are some fantastic themes in there, but it’s an open question as to how many of those are recently developed, or will continue to be updated as WordPress evolves.

The natural follow on question, for me at least:

Is there is a viable future for truly high quality, professional yet FREE themes or will premium become the dominant theme model in the WordPress community’s future? I’d love your thoughts.