Wizard's Place

Archive for the ‘Free WP Themes’ Category

There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of old WordPress themes around. Most of them are free. A lot of the old themes were designed before many of the new WordPress features and functions existed. Some of them contain what were completely new concepts at the time which have since been incorporated into the WordPress core system albeit in a somewhat different way. The long and the short of it is that many old themes just don’t work — or don’t work completely — with the current WordPress structure.

Dan Therrell is a good friend of mine who owns a web services company called Zfish (formerly Blue Mullet Web Services). Over the years we’ve collaborated on a number of projects. He recently came across an impressive free theme called Notebook Chaos which he decided to use on his main Zfish.com site.

Immediately upon installation Dan discovered that the theme didn’t work the way he was hoping. Pages weren’t functioning as expected and some content wasn’t showing up where planned. It wasn’t that the theme was broken. It was just that it was coded in such a way that a number of typical (today) WordPress concepts either weren’t included or they were hard coded into the pages so they couldn’t be adjusted in the usual fashion from the WordPress management Dashboard.

I was fortunate enough to be talking to Dan about another matter at about the same time as he had added this theme to his site and he asked me to have a look at it. I found it to be made up of clean code that was easy to edit and between us we sorted out the things necessary to make an old theme work on a current WordPress installation. And sometimes the results are really worth the effort!

This wonderfully warm richly colored professional WordPress theme has a two column design (sidebar to the right) was designed exclusively for Smashing Magazine by ProductiveDreams. It is free for personal or business use but may not be resold without permission.

I can install and/or modify this theme for you. It can be downloaded HERE!