Warning: These are the musings of a WordPress neophyte.
When I decided to create this #Project365 photo journal, I went looking for an appropriate WordPress theme that met a few basic criteria:
- It had to be free, because I had no budget
- It should require minimal customization, because my CSS/PHP skills are very limited.
- It must feature photographs prominently
In addition, I wanted a theme that generally looked nice, with a pleasing color scheme, modern typography, and no hideous graphics. Narrowing the field was no small task, with more than 2,000 free themes listed on WordPress.org.
Featured Images
When I first began populating my site with content, I was using a theme that included a large featured image on every post. I realized that this makes for a nicely simplified workflow. It can also make switching to a different theme more difficult, if the new theme requires placement of a large image within the body of the blog post. Some themes omit the featured image altogether, while others impose an unusual crop of some sort. In some cases this can be modified by upgrading to the premium version of the theme, or digging into the CSS and PHP files, but that would violate rule #2.
As I sifted through this bevy of options, the Masonry-style themes (also known as Pinterest, tile, or grid themes) stood out for their ability to display a number of thumbnails simultaneously. In contrast, old-school blog formats typically display single entries in chronological order — a good choice if simplicity is paramount, or you want visitors to focus on one thing at a time. There are many other variations, of course, including full-screen themes, which fill your screen with images from edge to edge.
All masonry themes are not created equal. Many only the grid layout for portfolios and galleries only, not daily blog posts. Narrowing down the list of themes that produce an out-of-the-box masonry style blog page, I found these favorites.
Pho
This is the theme in use on my blog at the time of this post. It offers out-of-the box functionality, a prominent featured image on every post, and good readability. The minimalist design keeps visitors focused on content, so nothing stands between your eyeballs and my photos. I like the built-in featured post slider, which can be configured to display tagged posts, or disabled with one click. (Geek-worthy point of pride: I found an error in the CSS file with this theme — a reference to LinkedIn.org that was interfering with the social icons, and I corrected it all by myself!)
Fukasawa
This is minimalism at its best. While options for customized typography and color schemes are limited, this theme just works. The same can be said for other themes by Anders Noren, including masonry-style layouts Hitchcock and Baskerville. In my case, Fukasawa’s silky fluid layout, clean left-side navigation, and the ability to use vertical/portrait feature images were among the most attractive features.
Silvia
This theme does some especially nice things with photographs, including a nifty grayscale-hover effect with featured images (which can be disabled). It also allows the webmaster to choose from hundreds of Google fonts, and displays EXIF data for each image on the attachment pages. With this theme, minimalism has a price, as there is no place on the home page for any widgets at all. If you use excerpts with your posts, those words appear above the featured photo which I find distracting and redundant.
Stacker Lite
Another example of minimalism, but with a focus on conversation, Stacker displays the number of comments for each post inside an icon with each featured image. That’s great, if you get lots of comments, but rows and rows of zeros can be a little demoralizing. Another odd feature is the counter-intuitive way it orders posts from top to bottom instead of left to right, in keeping with the “stacking” idea, I suppose.
Gazette
A big, brash theme with bold headlines, an optional grid of highlighted posts, and eye-popping edge-to-edge featured images. That prominence comes with a price, however. The featured image for each post is cropped in a panorama like manner that trims off much of the top and bottom. Not bad for many landscape photos, but I foresee some heads being chopped off in a very awkward manner.
Hatch
Another clean, minimalistic option that offers true masonry blog layout out-of-the-box. While the featured images on each post are not quite as prominent as I might like, the overall readability/usability ranks high. The front-page header features rotating images, accompanied by an author bio. This is a nice intro to the blog’s author, and their portfolio, but it could be much better if the featured image were clickable, and the accompanying text came from the blog post rather than the bio.
Honorable Mention
Other notable masonry themes include GK Portfolio (lots of animations that should be disabled as quickly as possible, and itty-bitty fonts that require some CSS work to correct), Annina ( nifty larger-than-usual recent post, and giant left-side navigation) and Tetris (you’ll want to disable your site tagline and decide if you can tolerate the cartoonish social media icons).
Have I overlooked anything here?
If you’ve discovered a good photoblogging WordPress theme, and you’d like me to try it out, please comment below. Thank you, and happy coding!