WordPress is the best blogging platform.
Running a website on WordPress.com instead of self-hosting gives you access to the latest and greatest features of WordPress Multi-user, as well as the opportunity to provide feedback before the features become public. It also has it’s downfalls with the restrictions on custom plug-ins, javascript, embedding flash, paying for CSS editting and only being able to host image specific file types (images, doc, pdf, ppt). Most of these restrictions are for the best because they keep away the sploggers and force minimalism. This is a good thing, there is far too much sidebar cruft out there which distracts from content.
You know, content? The reason why people read blogs in the first place? The reason why people write blogs in the first place? (And you thought it was AdSense revenue)
In my five months at engtech.wordpress.com my most negative experience with has been themes. Theme selection isn’t a problem, there are a number of themes to choose from (although there is a distinct lack of cat-focused themes, but hey, I can suggest one). It is the inconsistency in theme features.
Choosing a theme is like buying a house, there are purely cosmetic features that will appeal to some, but what’s of real importance is the bare bones — the foundation. My goal is to find the themes with the best foundations, and hopefully draw attention to the themes with poor foundations so they can get some Automattic lovin’.
Once a week I’m going to review 4-5 different themes on WordPress.com and post my findings. I’ll highlight features and bugs, as well as develop a spreadsheet of what’s available so that the WordPress.com community can evaluate themes at a glance. Luckily switching themes is very simple, so I can do it all with one test blog.
Special thanks members of the wordpress.community for feedback: Time Thief, Lorelle, Vuee
Subscribe to engtech’s WordPress.com Theme Review series.
WordPress.com Theme Review: Shocking Blue Green, Blix, Regulus, Sandbox, Kubrick
WordPress.com Theme Review: Pressrow, Andreas04, Andreas09, Connections
WordPress Theme Review: Pool, Cutline, Rounded, Day Dream
WordPress Theme Review: Light, Solipsus, Supposedly Clean, Rubrick
WordPress Theme Review: ChaoticSoul, Tarski, Unsleepable, K2-Lite
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60 Comments
Thanks for the comprehensive review, engtech.
I love the look of Cutline, and might incorporate some of its features into my custom CSS.
Day Dream is good but something horrible happens if one has too many categories or links in the bottombar. It looks very messy when text flows out of its designated space.
I don’t know if you will consider this to be significant or not but apparently ‘Cutline’ doesn’t show a trackback link http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4176&replies=8.
Cutline is appealing to me except, that is, when it comes to the typography. I much prefer the typography in DayDream although I don’t prefer the theme itself because I have an aversion to “skinny” themes.
If this theme that you are currently using had a custom header I would be tempted to choose it for my environmental blog.
Thanks for the ongoing work. It looks like the bug hunters will have a comprehensive list of “insects” to trigger from wp.com theme hidey holes by the time you are done.
I really should check for the trackback link. I’m just being lazy.
Also add fields for theme author, and a link to the wordpress.net theme viewer (even though it might be out of date).
And check if the view by category page shows excerpt or not.
I should try to reproduce this bug: http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4317&replies=6
Very nice work engtech. Couple of comments as a potential user of your review: since the images of the themes are unclickable what’s the point of having them? Or are you assuming that everyone knows what the themes look like already? If not where will they see them? I just wondered, because they are so tiny you can’t really see any detail. It would be nice if these were thumbnails, but wondered if there was a problem linking to these as themes (not sure you can do it from Wp.com, but what about .org Themeviewer?) Just a thought.
Second, there are quite a number of comparison components (which is great, this is such a lot of work on your part) so a very long table. The trouble with the long table is that by the time you scroll down to the end you’ve forgotten what’s at the top and you can’t see it, so you have to scroll back up. Kind of defeats the purpose for me as I personally like to see as much as possible “at a glance”.
But this is certainly more than we have now as comparsions without actually applying the theme to a blog. Good job.
To make the post more visual :)
There are links to larger version of the images in the table, but I will change them so that they link to a bigger image. I’m also planning to include links to view the themes online — the only problem is that they won’t necessarily be the same version of the theme as WordPress.com (unless I create sample WP.com blogs for each theme, which I may do once I’ve developed my test blog so that it finds more bugs).
Yup, unfortunately the question is “What information do you want to see at a glance?”
There’s a lot of info to track, and no matter what kind of summary I put it won’t be exactly right for someone. That’s why at the end of it all I’ll be making the data available as a spreadsheet and people can organize it to however makes sense.
I am repeating the theme names with every section. One thing I noticed is that WP.com stripped out some of my markup on the older theme reviews. I’ll go back and fix it.
…. done
Is that better? One other change I’ll make (not now, too late at night) is put “Major Features” as the first section instead of the second section. Do you guys have any suggestions for other features that should be considered “major” that are very useful for high-level comparison?
I really appreciate outside feedback, especially at making this more user friendly. Sometimes when you’re doing it yourself you get too close to it and you can’t see the trees for the forest.
- When mentioning a bug I *need* to include images of the bug
- wptheme.wordpress.com should have the name of the current theme as the first post
- links to download the theme for self-hosted wordpress (people are finding the review when looking for wordpress themes for their site)
engtech - I understand… this is not an easy review to do. One thing is that you need to update the Press Row review, for example, there IS an edit posts option, rss comments, rss posts (at least on my blog) there is a logout under admin… I;m also not sure what you mean by does not display pages… since these are displayed at the top of theme. Anyway I will give the review another look later in the week and I may have some suggestions for “at a glance” stuff. You’ve captured most of them though.
P.s. have the link to the review somewhere prominent - I couldn’t find it because you’ve written new posts.
@britgirl
The link to the review is on my sidebar as “wordpress.com resources”. Bolded, too.
I know what you mean though, how do you get to this page that has comments? (It’s not showing up when searching for posts because it’s a page). It is linked to three times in each of the posts, but I’ll also put a comment on the posts that “if you want to leave a comment, click here”. (I’m doing it this way because I only want to have one set of comments for ALL of the review. Otherwise it gets very hard for me to follow… especially considering there’ll probably be 10-12 posts of 4 reviews each at the end of this).
With Pressrow the “page order” is not used for displaying pages. There is a field for each page where you can give a number and theoretically the pages will be displayed in that order. So far it has only worked on one theme, Blix.
I think I need to do two things.
#1 - have a small list before the table that explains what each section is and can be used to quickly jump to a section
#2 - have an overall help page that includes screenshots of what I’m talking about, and then get you guys to take a look at it and let me know if the help makes any sense.
I noticed that you have tested nested lists in the HTML test post on your wptheme blog. But you haven’t tested mixed lists - e.g. an unordered list nested within an ordered list. All the lists are nested within the same type.
I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the themes, but I’ve been having trouble (in Kubrick) with an unordered list nested inside an ordered list displaying as a ‘combined’ ordered/unordered list!
I’ve submitted a Feedback report, so we’ll see how that goes. You can check the first post on my blog if you want to see what I mean…
Good catch, I’ll add it to the testing template.
I’ve also been meaning to add EM and STRONG. I’m only testing B and I.
ToDo: Add info for timestamps! which someone has already collected. Credit them in the Thanks section.
http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=1703&replies=8
Don’t know if this is a glitch for today, but the current theme sidebar is overtopping (in front of) the comments. Also the left margin is gone. I’m using Firefox with updated extensions (but not FF2) Never noticed this before. [I'm very grateful for your work on analyzing themes.]
Yeah, that’s a bug with this theme :)
In IE 6 the sidebar overlaps all text, not just the comments.
Thanks for all this info. Do you know the largest amount of pixels that it can handle? I’m guessing 550 or 600 but don’t want to throw the margins out of whack - I’ve been known to do that in the past.
I stick with 500px wide images just to be safe. The majority of the “wide” themes on WP are safe for 500px. I try not to optimize my posts for a certain theme because I know in the future I may switch — so 500px is a good figure.
Thanks, I appreciate the info. Also you can’t leave comments for some reason. Is that just me or anybody else having that problem?
Some posts have comments turned off.
The problem with Tarski’s comments that I discovered was that the commenter thought they were commenting on a certain entry and the comment displayed under the last post showing on my index page. So technically I did get comments, but they were under different posts. So of course I moaned to WP and they said they’re “working on it”. Personally I think they should pull the theme until it’s working.
Just paid for the wordpress.com upgrade. What a waste of money! I am so disappointed that I cannot see and edit my theme. I’m gonna complain…
Tarski has a really serious bug in that it assigns comments to the wrong post, i.e. you comment on one post but the comments end up being attached to another post. Call me harsh but I’d rate that as a critical bug. For a blog that includes comments, Tarski is completely unusuable. Which is a shame because it’s really nice looking.
I noticed the same two problems with K2 as you did– I much prefer to edit comments within the context of the post they comment upon (i.e., on the same page as the post. Trackbacks I could edit through the dashboard).
From the perspective of the veiwer (reader) it is important for the writer/editor to spot and correct the gestalt.
Also, the horizontal rule doesn’t function. Minor for me, but would be nice. Otherwise I find the K2 more readable and easier to edit for my non-specialists to find info. Cutline is good. Regulus is nice but still the text is too indistinct and the doubled sidebar breaks when widgets are added.
Thanks again for your work.
Hi engtech,
Chaotic Soul - IMO you’re right on. It’s a beautiful dark theme and I love black backgrounds but unfortunately the font is itsy, bitsy, teeny weeny with letters so close together that I have a real challenge trying to focus when reading.
K2 may not have page templates but it does have “authors” page. I would also prefer to be able to edit the comments from the “front end” but out of the MANY themes I’ve tried it’s the one I prefer.
Tarski - well what can I say? IMO the angryaussie “said it all”. For private blogs that function as diaries or journals the comments situation might be tolerable but most bloggers do want comments and expect them to be attached to the correct post. The bug is a serious one.
P>S> In case @gracie drops by again the FAQs blog has all the sizes for all the themes http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/how-big-can-my-images-be/
Thanks for the review. These have really helped a lot in not only solidifying my knowledge of the template system, but getting rid of these damn bugs too. What you said about ChaoticSoul is really flattering, since I hold it so dear… I might have to fix the little annoyances that you and timethief are finding so it can be the best theme there is. ;)
Also, I’ll be trying to make my wordpress blog the place where I store all major theme updates that don’t fit onto the .com blog, so keep your eyes there too.
Thanks for dropping by Bryan. I’m glad Automattic has someone on board now to look at these issues.
I’ve added http://bryan.wordpress.com/ to my feed reader.
cheers
So… tried once again the Tarsky theme. It’s there, comments working but… there’s still no “previous page” and, sometimes, we can see ALL posts on the “Recent Posts” widget.
By the way. Anyone knows how to include html on the widgets bar? It’s a free version…
Cheers.
@CJT:
Add a text widget, and put the HTML inside of the text widget.
Hey, impressive work! Your review lists are great checklists for me as a theme designer. By looking at the common errors and bugs you have found, I can make sure to fix the bugs before I release a new theme. It was also interesting to read the reviews of Andreas04 and Andreas09, since those are based on two of my designs. I learned several useful things from it, so thanks a lot!
@mpb: it’s pretty amazing the number of themes that have HR styled to not show. It’s great for breaking up text.
@tt: I just tried K2-Lite again, and I didn’t see any support for Page Templates at all. Was it another theme?
Re Tarski bug: I agree that it makes the theme unusable for a lot of blogs. But that’s the entire reason why I started this, because I kept on finding a reason themes were unusable :)
@Andreas: Thanks for stopping by! Yeah, I’m glad I did this as well. I think at the end of it all it’s going to make for a really nice checklist for theme designers of things to watch out for. My test blog keeps getting updated as I find more corner cases and things to look for.
(also, sorry for the delay on comment responses… I built up a backlog and I kept telling myself “I’ll go through them tomorrow”)
@engtech - I’m sorry about that misleading statement I made about the ability to specify different authors on the K2 theme coming across as a claim that it had page templates when it doesn’t. I change the themes on my test blog so many times a day and to try thing out first before I answer questions on the forum that I must have got lost in Blix and confused. :(
P.S. I’m truly glad to see designers dropping in and noticing what a valuable resource you have been creating. I’m looking forward to seeing bloggers use it to make their theme selections too. :)
@tt: As usual, no worries. It only took me 20 secs to try it out. :)
Yeah, I’m glad this is getting around as well, if only because it might mean better themes for WordPress.
thanks for the hard work!
but honestly, I liked your old format, without as many images, because then I can copy/paste everything in excel and compare. Then I can simply delete rows that I don’t care about. The images kinda kills my excel table.
but finding these reviews certainly save me time because now, I don’t have to test every theme just to find ones with a certain function enabled.
by the way…when I tried out Pool, the category links WERE breaked…even though you said they weren’t. you might want to fix that ^^
Thank you for the extensive review. I am new to WordPress so I spent hours testing out themes. Once I read your review on Tarski, I know that’s the one. The biggest turn-off of the other themes is the link text color which is always too light. Tarski got that color just right except for the sidebar section title in super light green. I like the red text in the sample page but how come we don’t get to have that?
Anyhow, WordPress should add a link to your review on the theme selection page. Thanks again.
Thanks for the kind words. You might want to check to see if you like how the pages look with Tarski and comments — that’s a problem a lot of people are having.
I finally got my first comment and it seems to work on Tarski. After using this theme for a while, I got some likes and dislikes:
The Footer Widget is great. It works like the sidebar except it’s at the footer of the page. However, its layout is vertical so when you add more widgets, it just goes straight down. I wish it’s horizontal so I can have Page links like most websites out there.
The Page Order is definitely dictated by the theme so it stays alphabetical. But the tip in the Forum about adding spaces to page title works so I got my pages in the order I like.
Thanks for the update.
On most of the reviews there is no information in the spreadsheet about whether the post author can be displayed. Any other than Rubric? I’m really disappointed I can’t do this with Cutline, which I really like.
That was a field I came up with further down in the review process.
You mentioned that your blog uses “Shocking Blue, Green”. If you mean this blog, it sure doesn’t look like it. Are you using the aforementioned theme?
I’m curious how you have so artfully created the look of this blog. Are you using the standard WP offerring? Are you modifying one of the themes in some form or fashion? How is this done?
Thanks
Ah, I was using Shocking Blue Green when I originally wrote that review in September. :)
I’m using the Sandbox theme with the custom CSS upgrade. I learned CSS and spent around 16 hours tweaking the design until I liked the way it looked (and more importantly, my readers liked the way it looks).
engtech this is a great resource…you’re building up lots of good karma points…even though the reviews don’t answer my one burning question (which themes support the display of the optional excerpt of articles rather than the full articles) I think this is about the most useful thing I’ve seen in a long time.
These are great reviews. You’re definitely filling a need.
Have you thought about uploading the spreadsheet data you’ve compiled to a wiki? Considering the number of themes available, and the number of data categories, the data compilation is a lot of work. You might be able to get others involved in filling in the technical data.
Actually the Sandbox does have a top navbar (it is listed as a “No” in your chart). Think I’ll fix that page order bug you noticed though. Good!
The sandbox skins on WordPress.com don’t seem to have a navbar — or at least they didn’t at the time of testing.
I’ve seen the div when using my own custom CSS on top of Sandbox, but I don’t think it’s displayed.
Just switched mine over to Tarski as it does multi-author well, including allowing browsing by author. The comments thing seems to be fixed - except that the comments area is at the base, not of the post, but of the sidebar. This means that, with a long sidebar and a short post, the two get very disconnected.
If the comments were moved up to be immediately below the post this would be the ideal theme for me. As it is I will just put up with that fault for the time being to allow the browsing by author.
Just found another advantage of Tarski over my old one (Regulus) - printing actually works. Regulus would never insert a page break (no matter how long the text, it would try to keep it on one page) and it looked terrible on any printer, either off IE or FF. Tarski formats it properly for print, removing most formatting.
I am sold.
Thanks for these reviews. I like Chaotic Soul the best of any WP.com themes released to date, but it was worth it to me to pay $15 just to increase the font size. I have a lot of older readers. I think designers need to think about accessiblity issues a bit more.
Is there a theme that will automatically cause all posts to have short openings followed by more… or something similar to click on to see the rest of the post?
great idea, I need to visit you more often :)
Thanks for this. I didn’t realize there were any actual benefits to being hosted with wordpress.org rather than yourself. :P
please please peeeeeeeeeeese do a comparison of three-column themes. i love three-column themes, bcos that means two sidebars. however not all three-column themes deliver ALL that they promise. could you do a comparison ASAP?
i need to choose a theme fast, because my blogs will have a healthy amount of images. and changing a theme means uploading images again, bcos different themes support different image sizes.
thanks for your effort.
Thank you for the new themes and your take on them. I would like it if you would do a comparison of three-column themes.
I have found a pink theme I would like on my wordpress.com site, but Its not in the wordpress themes. Is there no way to allow us to upload our own themes, or can we recommend one?
Im looking at the WordPress pretty in pink. Can you please upload a few diffrent colored themes?
@Deb:
No, we cannot upload our own themes on WordPress.com
We’re stuck with what they offer, or you can buy the CSS update for $15/year to be able to customize your own theme — but that’s if you know how to build your own from scratch. It still doesn’t let you upload one of your own.
http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/edit-my-templates/
http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/07/can-you-add-a-theme-to-wordpresscom-please/#respond
I use that Shocking Blue Green theme and want to put a “search” feature (widget?) on a Page. Can I do that? If so how, if not is there another Theme as functional as Shocking Blue Green that will allow that?
Thanks much,
Dennis
@ doctordilday:
Yes, you can add a Search widget to Shocking Blue Green.
You can add any widget to any theme that supports widgets.
It’s easy enough to add a widget to the side bar of the blog, but how do you add a widget to one of the pages?
Dennis
@ doctordilday:
What do you mean by adding a widget to one of the pages?
The sidebars should display on all of the pages for most themes.
HI,
which one allows for group blogging? Pl advise.
I loved the update. Thanks.