It has to give me a pony ride too!

April 30, 2010 11:58 AM

I'm looking for a completely minimal blog/cms/wordpress skin.

Ok, so my idea for my site is that I want to have a sort of blog set-up that's almost completely minimal. I want it to display the current post, its date, a title, and nothing else. I don't want any bars or gadgets on the side. In terms of archiving past posts, I just want some numbers or an "older" link at the bottom.

Does anything exist like this out of the box? I have wordpress set up on the site right now (and not really doing anything), so a wordpress skin that gave this type of fuctionality would also work.

I wouldn't be opposed to a CMS, because it would be nice to have the option to automatically upload pictures without having to do it myself through FTP and coding html into the post. If you can recommend a CMS, a skin that would make it as minimal as possible would also be appreciated.

I've tried tumblr before (which sort of does what I'm talking about, especially with regards to picture uploading) but didn't like how it interfaced with my web hosting.

It also has to be free.

I looked at some other answer threads for minimalistic blogs / cmses, but they were a little old, so I was seeing if there was anything new out there.

posted by codacorolla to computers & internet (15 answers total)

Simplr should do the trick.
posted by eggplantplacebo at 12:01 PM on April 30, 2010

Clear is another one. I've used it to design my professional site (phoebenorth.com). If there's anything you don't like in the default appearance, you can just take it out via editing the .php through wordpress's "appearance" editor.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 12:09 PM on April 30, 2010

I really like Manifest a lot.
posted by Jairus at 12:35 PM on April 30, 2010

I just installed simplr, and it's pretty good. I can't remember the specifics of wordpress: is there a way to get rid of all that junk at the bottom? Recent Comments, categories, search, etc?
posted by codacorolla at 1:00 PM on April 30, 2010

Plaintxt.org has a collection of minimal wordpress themes.

Personally, I use Doc, which seems to meet your needs.

Just FYI: skins on WordPress are called "themes"...I'm not pointing this out to be pedantic, but knowing the right term might make Googling easier.
posted by Ian A.T. at 1:00 PM on April 30, 2010

Ok, so the site looks like this now:

http://www.coolsick.net/

How do I get rid of all that cruft at the bottom of the page?
posted by codacorolla at 2:29 PM on April 30, 2010

There should be a part of the template probably called footer.php that will have a bunch of junk in it like that stuff. You can delete most of that if not all of it. You'll want to make sure you hang on to the stuff that is necessary for building the page. I usually make a copy of the file somewhere on my computer and remove one thing at a time from the template, save, reload, remove another things, etc.
posted by jessamyn at 2:43 PM on April 30, 2010

jessamyn: Hmm, I tried that, and it got rid of the very, very bottom text (the credit stuff, which I'd like to leave in to give credit to the author of the theme). I guess my problem is that I don't know very much about PHP, so I'm not sure what to look for to delete it. Any ideas what else it may be called?
posted by codacorolla at 2:47 PM on April 30, 2010

Basically everything after the author's name and the code that follows it. So if you removed all this I'm pretty sure you'd be okay.
posted by jessamyn at 2:57 PM on April 30, 2010

Ok, I found it... it's under sidebar.php

http://pastebin.com/wsB1hzct

Only problem is I want to keep the archive part, but I'm unsure of what do delete. My one attempt just left a php error on the page. I really wish I had taken up programming as a kid.
posted by codacorolla at 3:03 PM on April 30, 2010

Leave the "sidebar.php" file alone. The way that file is structured is so that if you don't use any widgets, it will display the default info you see; as soon as you use one widget, that overrides the defaults. Widgets are actually pretty cool. The easy thing to do is to go to Appearance: Widgets in the admin view, and then drag just the "archives" widget over from "available widgets" to "sidebar." There might be a couple configuration options, but after that, you're done.

If you decide you want to add another widget or two to zazz up your blog someday, they'll be waiting for you.
posted by adamrice at 3:51 PM on April 30, 2010

(Just a sitenote, your site is already pretty slow. I'd go install wp-supercache pronto)
posted by bonaldi at 5:05 PM on April 30, 2010

Looks like you may have what you want at this point, but, have you checked out thematic?
posted by dubitable at 10:16 AM on May 1, 2010

I'm going to go with Simplr for now. Bookmarking this thread in case I want to try something esle. Thanks everyone!
posted by codacorolla at 1:41 PM on May 1, 2010

Atahualpa. It's completely configurable using menus and CSS. You can turn off what you don't want and make the rest look whatever way you want.
posted by 14580 at 4:12 AM on May 2, 2010