Wordpress for Multi-Genre Creators?

April 11, 2013 3:58 PM

Can you recommend a clean, minimalist Wordpress theme that can display art as well as writing? Bonus for free.

Most themes I'm seeing are designed for visual display of art OR blog-style writing. I'm looking for a theme that will display BOTH paintings AND excerpts from published writing...

I like this theme:

but I need more white space between the images. Also, I'm not sure if this will be able to satisfactorily handle writing as well.

Any suggestions?

posted by airguitar2 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Sometimes the theme doesn't matter as much as adding a gallery style plugin.

There are tons of gallery plugins but they all have different features. Therefore you may be able to focus on the design of the theme and the writing, then add a plugin.

Try searching through the plugins after you have installed the default theme and play around with them to see which one might be best. It seems that this may be the best option if you also want it to handle writing equally.
posted by Crystalinne at 4:03 PM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

Try Origami as a starting point. You can use it for free, but a small fee unlocks some slight features.

It's more minimal than the one you linked to.

And as Crystalinne says, plugins can do a lot.
posted by The Deej at 5:14 PM on April 11, 2013

Does it help to look for themes that allow the "Post Formats" feature (which can have different styles to show writing, short posts, photos, etc)? One sexy one is Ryu (not available for Wordpress.org yet).
posted by The Biggest Dreamer at 7:21 PM on April 11, 2013

I was coming to say the same as The Biggest Dreamer: Look for themes that support the Post Formats feature. There are a bunch.
posted by maniactown at 11:25 PM on April 11, 2013

Suggestion: put up your site, create some sample posts of both types of content, download some themes and see how each one looks. It is a tedious process but I have found a lot of themes cut off my images or the image bleeds over into the sidebar or there is some other disastrous result which just does not function.

I finally found a theme that is functional for my purposes but doesn't really do what I want in full. I periodically try again. Inspired by your post, I spent part of today doing that again. The theme linked above called Origami has a lot going for it. If I can figure out how to make it do a few things I want, I might go with that. I think my drawings look better with a dark background and that is one of my issues with Origami but it sounds like you want something white or pale. So I would suggest you try that one with some sample posts.

Here are some others I have looked at that have potential:
Mantra Highly customizable.

Glass This is by the same author as my current theme, so it doesn't screw up my images. It is much lighter in color than my theme so perhaps it would appeal to you. (I know mine does both image and text because I have on two WP installs, one being used as a blog, the other being use as a comic.)

Elegant Grunge This was the runner up choice for my comic. It is not as dark as my current theme. It seems to work with both images and writing.

I have downloaded a lot of themes aimed at photoblogging which just appear broken, though it is possible they are only broken on Android. I have also downloaded a lot that are very busy or artsy themselves in a way which distracts from looking at my drawings. For many months, my comic site was just a bunch of samples that I uploaded to see which programs worked, etc. So I feel your pain. I now have something functional but not really satisfactory. I hope to improve on it in the future.

I am very encouraged to see Origami. That is a lot closer to what I want than anything I have previously seen and I hope it suggests that I will soon find something more satisfactory. If you don't want to put a lot of time into this, I suggest you check it out and see if it is acceptable for your purposes. I have periodically spent several hours sifting through free themes and Origami is much better than most I have seen for displaying images.
posted by Michele in California at 4:21 PM on April 12, 2013

I really like Hum. It's very simple but does well with both images and text. It's very much a blog-style layout, though, not a fancy gallery or anything like that. Added bonus: it's responsive, which means it reconfigures itself depending on the screen size so that it displays well on a mobile device.
posted by ashirys at 7:51 AM on April 15, 2013