New Themes!
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Can you guys get some new, cooler themes, like hearts, or stars backgrounds?! That’d be really nice or maybe make it so i could go to the internet and put down a code and it would show up as my background?!
thanks!
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Hi there,
Staff do monitor these forum post but IMHO there aren’t going to be many new “fancy” themes on offer as the css customization upgrade allows us to modify the existing themes to suit us. If you have css editing skills then you can add stars, stripes, hearts or whatever to a stylesheet and change the complete look of any theme we have now. More information here http://faq.wordpress.com/category/customization/ -
hi i think the selection of themes on wordpress.com is very poor! there are many websites set up for diferent themes but i dont know how to work them!
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The only themes available to us are found here -> Presentation -> Themes. We cannot upload themes from other sites.
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The reason the themes are limited is due to couple of reasons I believe.
1. Lots of theme authors have not submitted their code to WP. Why, you ask. See #2
2. Many themes suffer from poor coding, allow or require javascipt (not allowed here); and the coder does not know how, or won’t customize/optimize it for WP.
If you ever start to work on themes, you will see what I mean.
The themes that WP uses, are clean, well layed out, and don’t bog the servers down. Some are actually quite good for SEO (cutline, pressrow, for instance). You may have noticed that none of the themes are heavy on graphics (thirteen, the banana, and the Christmas theme are the heaviest, and they are not that bad.)
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also (since I can never get “edit” to work) let me add that with fewer themes they can cache, and serve them more quickly.
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Matt has thrown out the idea of a Theme Marketplace for wp.com.
http://photomatt.net/2007/11/01/wpcom-marketplace-idea/Interesting idea, but it certainly won’t be implemented tomorrow. Meantime, as TT has pointed out, you can buy the CSS upgrade, if you have some CSS skills, or maybe hire a designer to work within the framework of one of the Sandbox themes.
@markljackson-the edit button is gone.
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The reason the themes are limited on .COM is, in the first place, due to they can’t be edited by the end user, because WP theme, basically, is a set of raw PHP files (no template tags etc).
that’s, by the way, why “Many WP themes suffer from poor coding”, and also why installing every new theme on .com is such a PITA-taking skilled labour which costs staff money (despite theme itself is a free one) and takes them time to accomplish.
everything else are just excuses.
the non-editable (by the end user) themes is due to WPMU is an attempt to hack a multi-blog version from WP (which in its turn is a hack of b2cafelog) which was never designed to be/intended as a truly multi-user blogging platform.
The themes that .COM uses, are the only ones that are free ones (in both senses). the number of themes, that are free *and* are high-grade ones together, is indeed rather limited.
the solution getting your blog customized is either going to self-hosted (there’re a variety of the freely available blogging scripts on the yard), or using such public blog hosts that allow theme/template/whatever editing. some of them well do that for free.
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1. Lots of theme authors have not submitted their code to WP
That would probably be because there is no mechanism for submitting themes to wordpress.com. What generally happens is that Matt pokes around the repositories a bit, finds something sufficiently blue and grey for his taste, and converts it. There is zero point in anyone else suggesting anything.
the coder does not know how, or won’t customize/optimize it for WP.
And that would probably be because Automattic are notoriously secretive about what needs to be done to get a theme to work with wordpress.com, or what features rule a theme out (other than not being GPL or lacking a big blue header). We know that having an options panel or ajax is bad, but nobody’s ever explained why. This is probably because they’re worried that if themers are able to develop with a multiblog setup in mind, rival WordPress MU hosts will benefit.
In the meantime, you can do a lot with custom CSS, even if $15 is wildly overpriced for functionality most other blog hosts will give you for free. You don’t need indepth knowledge of CSS if all you want to do is change the background image.
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