Essential elements of a WordPress theme

I am not talking about something premium or special, just about a WordPress theme that will be created to be downloaded by everybody. First of all, the theme should be easy to install, customize and use. I would like to point out, which are the essentials such a WordPress theme should contain:

1. Widgets

They are an important function that enables the user to customize the sidebar(s) of a theme without having to touch the source code. An essential featur every WordPress theme should have.

2. Bloginfo tags

Make sure the blogs title and description are displayed. They should be shown well visible in the header of the blog.
<a href="<?php bloginfo('url');?>/styles"><h1
id="blogtitle"><?php bloginfo('title');?></h1></a><div id="blogdescription"><?
php bloginfo('description');?></div>

Many themes I have seen so far forget to add them. The header graphic (if there is one) should leave enough room for the blog title.

3. Navigation using wp_list_pages()

The blogger using your theme most probably created some pages with static content. Make a navigation using the wp_list_pages function. Styling is made easy through the classes assigned: .page_item is the class assigned to every li element within the list of pages and .current_page_item is assigned to a li element for the page currently shown.

4. Feed links and search form

Although links to the blog’s feed can be added to the sidebar via widgets, I think the feed link should be added somewhere visible, using a feed icon to make it stand out. The same holds true for the search form, through which the blog posts and pages can be searched.

These are only some basic important features to consider when building a WordPress theme. Of course, there are many more aspects that make a theme easy to use for all bloggers.

Free WordPress theme: Lost Island

Today I released another free WordPress theme: Lost Island. Images and CSS were created by me, based on the Sandbox theme, which is absolutely fun to work with.

Lost Island comes along with a fresh blue and green color scheme and is, of course, widgets ready. Originally, the theme was created for Islaperdida.net, but I modified it and decided to release it to the public. I tested the design in the recent versions of Safari, Opera, Firefox, IE and in IE 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0, as well as in other browsers (Flock, Konqueror, to name only a few) and it worked fine.

The nice dynamic classes of the Sandbox enabled me to create and assign a different header image for different templates such as archives and categories. Feel free to download the theme and maybe comment about it