My First Theme: Lowstream

Hi, all! I was reading through the Codex information on preparing a theme for public release and thought I would follow one of the sugesstions, which was to post here.

The name of the theme is Lowstream and its main purpose, outside of being a WordPress theme is being my project to learn PHP. A good friend of mine has been doing server configuration and PHP coding as a profession for a long while now and commented that I should make the theme public.

The nature of the theme is very simplistic; I tried to do as much as possible using only CSS – minimal use of images or any other heavy objects. It doesn’t have Widgets or AJAX support because I’m not entirely sold on AJAX or its reliance on Javascript (sorry). It does however have its own control panel under the Presentation tab.

From this control panel, people can upload and select their header image (the good friend of mine I mentioned earlier is good friends with the folks at Tarksi, so this feature – at least the selection part – was ported from there with permission), they can set a global announcement and turn if off and on, and set their footer text.

As I said, this is my first public WordPress theme, so it may not be up to your standards, but I thought I’d still give it a shot here. The current version is 2.0.8 and I am planning a 2,1 release sometime in the near future which adds several new features, including being able to edit the colors scheme from the control panel and a thumbnail for the header image being created during upload, etc.

If you’d like to see it in action, I’ve set up a vanilla install on a default installation of WordPress, viewable at vanilla.lowstream.com.

The theme’s main site is at lowstream.com and for a peek at the 2.1 version I mentioned previously, go to beta.lowstream.com.

Feedback is very much welcome!