Happy Theme Thursday, all! Today I’m happy to introduce Libre, a new free theme designed by yours truly.
Libre
Libre brings a stylish, classic look to your personal blog or longform writing site. The main navigation bar stays fixed to the top while your visitors read, keeping your most important content at hand. At the bottom of your site, three footer widget areas give your secondary content a comfortable home.
Customize Libre with a logo or a header image to make it your own, or use one of two custom templates — including a full-width template with no sidebar — to change up the look of your pages. Libre sports a clean, responsive design that works seamlessly on screens of any size.

Read more about Libre on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes!
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This is exactly what I was looking for! It’s so pretty.
Now I have a choice to make. Should I keep my theme or change it?? Mhm.
Three words to describe this theme: plain, simple, and extraordinary. Definitely a theme that I’d use.
Quite a neat design. Well done.
Hello! How do I activate the sidebar?
You can add widgets to the sidebar (which displays on single posts and pages) under Customize -> Widgets. Make sure you’re viewing a single post or page when you go to the Customizer or you might not see the Sidebar area. 🙂
Carol, look this topic in the forum about Libre: https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/about-the-new-theme-libre
Yes, now that’s what I’m talking about! Taking some cues from Elmastudio I see.
Love it! Will definitely give it a try!
Looks clean and simple. I needed that fixed and always visible top navigation bar
Good job. This looks really nice and may be what I need for my new blog. Thank you.
Simple and clean. Just for writers. 🙂 I like.
Wow! I love how clean it looks!
A theme like this without the little header over the pave horizontally that shows the title of my blog would be better since it minimizes the size of the page a little.
Libre is a good longform theme. I mean it certainly pertains to writing more so I love it. I was also hoping you know in future to make long form themes a bit shaped like Ligonberry or Bueno if possible? But I do really like Libre. I like the colour palette given. One of them looks like old parchment. Well done WP team 😀 for a satisfying longform theme!
Love the theme. Simple & easy to navigate/read. Thanks for this new theme.
Very Minimalist design, something I really love 😀
Hi, is the default template for pages only or is it also for posts?
Hi! The default template (with the content on the left and the sidebar on the right) applies to both pages and posts. I hope this clarifies. 🙂
Brilliant – thank you
It looks pretty cool. If I wasn’t so attached to my layout, I would def do this.
-LLW
We were looking for a change of theme! This looks really good for our website! 😀
Loving and using it. I notice the site title displayed for a blog page is larger than for other page types, which causes my tagline to wrap only on the blog page. If this was intentional, is there a way to reduce the font or lengthen the title & tagline space in the theme?
Hi Mark! Yes indeed, you could customize this with some Custom CSS. Head over to the CSS Customization forum for tips!
Stunning. This theme floored me.
That’s Great, I love it.
Any body who will see it will only say one thing that is “amazing”.
Any chance this will be released for self-hosted sites?
Yes indeed! You can download it here from the link in the right-hand sidebar: http://wordpress.com/themes/libre/
The link to the free download was hard to find but I got it. Thanks!
So neat! Good job! Libre means free in Tagalog 🙂
Hi, is there a way to get the featured images to appear? Otherwise, I’ve got to make changes to all my posts which is quite a bit of work. Thanks.
Hi Melvin!
Libre does not support Featured Images, but there are a number of themes that do; you can find more options here: https://wordpress.com/themes/filter/featured-images/
Thanks Caroline. Thing is, I love Libre. Looks like I’m going to have to make some changes. 🙂
Nice and beautiful theme. 🙂
Reblogged this on Dabbas Portfolio and commented:
I love “Libre”,,,, VERY GOOD!
🙂 My new choice 🙂 Minimal, elegant, with modern feeling 🙂
it does look nice but, I’m not just comfortable changing my themes. i feel so comfortable with what I have currently.
Also note that you are able to preview the look of your blog on different themes (free or premium) with the Customizer: https://wordpress.com/support/customizer/
We’ve also published a few posts at The Daily on testing out themes and giving your blog a makeover:
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2013/10/30/test-blogs/
https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2015/02/11/blog-makeover/
Thank you for the theme! I love it.
I’ve been using the Tonal theme since I got onto WordPress, but I like the look of Libre. I also like the sidebar feature for listing menu, something I don’t think Tonal has.
can anyone, I mean, anyone tell me why I am not getting the instructions for the blog 101?? I mentioned several times this problem and now the responses to that blog are closed… Anyone??? pleaseeeee
Hi Hanna — it looks like there’s a typo in the email address you used to register — I’ll send an invitation to the address listed with this comment in a moment. You’ll be able to find the first few assignments there!
This is great. I just switched over to this theme. It is so wonderfully simple and subtle. Thank you.
Very nice theme. Especially like how it looks on mobile.
After mucking around a bit in the code, I’m stumped on something: Is it possible to remove just the author/byline? I’ve only been able to hide all the entry-meta data, but would prefer to keep the entry date.
Thanks for your time & for sharing this theme!
Sure thing! In your Custom CSS panel, add:
.byline { display: none; }Lightweight, clean, simply but fantastic theme.
Love the theme and have adopted it. At first, I thought it was a premium theme by Elma Studio … I love her work, too. For anyone wanting to see this theme in use, check out my site. Coding Insider
Thanks Caroline for such a great theme!