The Best Editable WordPress Themes AND How to Edit Themes in General!
OK this Editable WordPress Themes article gives you the best of both worlds -
1) A couple of Easy to modify WordPress themes for those who like it easy with good control and no headaches.
2) The best Editable Wordpress Themes WITHOUT coding. This includes some FREE Themes and some Professional Themes (ones you purchase).
2) An overview of the tools and techniques for editing Themes in general – ie getting into the code!
3) And a link to a review of the Thesis Theme and some others: You can click on this link to check out our review of the Thesis theme which is the ultimate in editability without being a coder.
First, the Best Professional Editable WordPress Themes:
The WooThemes CODA WordPress Theme
Ok this one is a lightly Editable WordPress Themesand perfect for the average user who just wants his blog to be modifiable to his tastes without getting complicated.
Coda is an elegant and feature-rich magazine style Editable WordPress Themes with a neat home page js scroller, and an otherwise completely widget based home page design
—>>> This is a great feature. The Widgetized design essentially makes Coda an Editable WordPress Theme WITHOUT the Coding!
The more widget based the Theme is, the more Editable WordPress Themes are flexibility you will have in laying out your content and advertisements/features the way you want them. With a custom styled Twitter module, a “Share this” module and a “Like this” popularity-based post feature this theme will surely woo you.
- A Great Theme by Woo Themes - Coda
These are some of the features that you will find within this WP Coda Theme by WooThemes:
- This Editable WordPress Themes has a Home page featured scroller – A custom home page featured area to showcase specific posts, all powered by jQuery. This is a terrific feature that adds usability and style to your Theme.
- A widgetized home page – The Coda home page is completely widget based with loads of great custom widgets for placement.
- Timeline Page Template – A beautiful archive template visualized according to dates. There is also a Tag Archives template unique to this theme. Again, The archives of your Theme is a simple function but when done right, like this, it ads to the usability of your blog and keeps the readers coming back.
- Custom Widgets – Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the widgetized footer: Flickr, Ads, Twitter, Featured Media and Latest/Popular Post accordion.
- This Editable WordPress Themes also gives you Alternative Styles – 10 beautiful, alternate styles to choose from and options to set your own background color or upload a background image. This is something that other WordPress Theme companies fail to do well also. Woo Themes has the market cornered on ease of customability.
You can Click HERE to go see coda and even Demo it at the WooThemes site!
Now for Truly Editable WordPress Themes that give you a LOT more control
OK how about Editable WordPress Themes that are even more customizable but still without coding. More like legos building. There are 2 that comes to mind. Socrates and WP Remix:
Soctrates Theme an Editable WordPress Themes in a lego’s sort of way:
1) Socrates is a Premium Theme that you buy. $40 – $50 bucks.
2) It comes with a 60 day money back guarantee so it is risk free. I like that.
3) It is different from most Premium Themes in that instead of paying for one theme you get a tool kit full of options
- Its options are plug and play in nature
- No coding required but you can if you want to.
- It comes with just a ton of options and header designs and colors which is good for me because I am not a graphic artist and I SUCK at header designing. Most of my older sites have the stock header provided by the Theme I used.
4) So you can make a ton of different Themes all using the Socrates Theme. Cool!
5) It is a lot easier to use then Thesis. I gave up on Thesis after a few days. With Socrates you can have a site up and running in an hour if you want or fine tune it as much as you want. Up to you.
6) I like the way it is set up for making money right out of the box with Adsense, affiliate marketing, etc. all designed in.
7) I like that they are very open and you can find out anything you need BEFORE paying for the product and return it within 60 days for full money back if you find out anything you don’t like after buying it!
All things considered $40 bucks for this is a very good deal.
WP Remix is the other Editable WordPress Theems that has Lego’s like functionality:
WordPress remix 3.0
WP Remix is the fastest solution of the three,
- You can use the WPRemix 3 templates right out of the box.
- You can learn how to design WordPress Templates without going crazy on the customizations.
- You can add in functionality or new customizations as you learn more.
- But to start you can generate new themes right out of the box
If You use the theme templates as they are, without imagining all sorts of things you would like to do but don’t possess the knowledge to accomplish, a perfectly presentable professional Website can be created by most end users. Still, The theme is a great time saver for those who understand CSS and a bit more daunting for those who may need to brush up on their CSS and HTML.
Of course, all of the standard bells and whistles one would expect to find are present and accounted for in the functionality of the Remix theme. Some of them I never even thought of when I was originally learning How to Design WordPress Themes.
WP Remix Includes things like: RSS Feeds, Subscribe by Feed Burner email forms, sharing and book marking, a site search field, Testimonials and much more. There are unique specialty pages that provide for tabbed and slider presentation of information. You will be hard pressed to imagine much more than has already been thought of in Remix.
Free WordPress themes that you can customize to a certain extent
1) Atahualpa by Bytesforall
Click here for the Atahualpa Free Editable WordPress Theme Download
Hard not to like this free WordPress Theme and 450,000 downloads say a lot of other people like it too!
The amount of options and flexibility in this free WP Theme may actually be too much for the average blogger. Build your own unique, professional and browser-safe WordPress Theme: 1-5 columns, fluid or fixed width, rotating header images and 2 dozen option pages.
Average Rating 4.9 stars
Current Version: 3.4.6 Updated 02/16/2010
Downloaded 450,000 times
Tags: translation-ready, sticky-post, threaded-comments, theme-options, custom-header, custom-colors, flexible-width, one-column, white
Constructor Blog Skin Download by Antonshevchuk
Click here for the Constructor Free Editable WordPress Theme Download
We like this Free Blog Skin Download because it is so versatile. I am very big on WordPress Themes that are designed to let you customize them (unless you want to get into the code to make changes which the average person can’t do) and this one has a lot of flexibility built in to it. WordPress Constructor Theme, it’s many-in-one theme (six layouts, configured colors, fonts and slideshow, widget ready). Build your own theme on settings page. For WordPress version 2.8+ (include 3.0)
Making any WordPress Theme an Editable WordPress Theme! We are talking coding here!!!
Using the Theme Editor and Plugin Editorto Edit a WordPress theme
This guide is from the WordPress Codex so it is straight from the Horses Mouth so to speak!
WordPress contains two built-in editors that allows you to edit Theme files directly from within your browser. They are called the Theme Editor and Plugin Editor.
Access the Theme Editor from the Administration > Appearance > Editor menu.
The Plugin Editor is located at Administration > Plugins > Editor.
To view a file in these editors, click on the file from the left-hand side list.
More information on editing themes is available at Theme Development and Using Themes.. You can learn more about editing plugins at Writing a Plugin and Plugin Resources.
What Files Can Be Edited?
From within the WordPress Built-in Editor, the following file types may be edited, if writable:
- HTML
- PHP
- CSS
- .htaccess
- TXT (and related text-like files such as RTF)
Things You Need to Know
- SEARCH
- There isn’t any. There isn’t any REPLACE either. You just have to scroll through the file to find what you are looking for. Alternatively you can use an external editor. There are not any line numbers either, so if you are using Firebug to play with your layout, you just have to guess what line you’re on in the Theme Editor.
- File Permissions
- To edit a file through the Built-in Editor, the permissions for that file must be set to 666. You can change the permissions on files by using a FTP client program, web-based interface provided by your host, or from the command-line using telnet or ssh (secure shell). These options are dependent on the type of access your host offers.
- Instant Changes
- The changes you make in the WordPress editors are instant and you do not need an FTP client program. You are changing the files online. You and visitors will see the changes immediately.
- Make a Mistake? Use the Backup Files
- Backup all files before editing. If you make a mistake, copy the file back onto your site from the backed up files. No backup? You will need to download WordPress, your Theme, and whatever files you need to replace and start over. BACKUP FIRST.
- Make a Bigger Mistake? Delete
- If the changes you make cause your site to “crash” or gives you a blank screen or screen filled with errors, if you cannot access your Administration Panels, delete the changed file and replace it with a good one from your backup.
Editing Files Offline
To edit files offline on your computer, you can use any text editor, open the file and make changes. Again, be sure the original file is backed up!
It is not recommended to change core WordPress files other than wp-config.php; if you must change anything else, take notes and store them in a text file in your WordPress root directory and make a backup copy of them for future reference and upgrades.
After saving the file, upload it to the appropriate folder on your WordPress site using an FTP client. Then view the results in your browser to check if the desired change has taken effect.
Use Caution With These Editors
If you use any editor that is not a text-only editor, can corrupt the file you are editing. Examples of editors to completely avoid include:
- ANY word-processor, such as:
- Microsoft Word
- WordPerfect
- OpenOffice
- Apple iWork Pages
- Microsoft Publisher
- ANY Do-It-Yourself Instant Web Page Software
Use these only if you are very familiar with them:
- Dreamweaver
- It’s best to copy from the WordPress editor, replacing what Dreamweaver puts in new files by default.
- FrontPage
- watch out for extra code inserted by FrontPage, and don’t try to use its built-in templates … also watch for IE-specific code which can make your site look or act unexpectedly in certain browsers, which you want to stay away from, because you want your website to be viewable in ALL browsers possible, so make sure you take out the IE-specific code, or else your blog will be doomed to failure. So, just watch out all the time for all IE-specific code, and DELETE it immediately, or else your blog will be dooomed to failure.
OK thats it for our Editable WordPress Themes Article!
I’d add WP Weaver to the list, pretty customisable, without getting ‘codified’, and a few different templates to get you started.
Thanks for the Tip on WP Weaver. I never heard of it (there are thousands out there) I will check it out today.