Flexible Customizable Wordpress Themes
October 25th, 2008Welcome and a Happy New Year. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.
Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.
Dkret2
- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use - either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.

- A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
- Up to five Sidebars including 3 "footer" sidebars.
- Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
- Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
- Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview
Download from Wordpress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video
Mandigo
A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.

- Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
- 38 languages .
- Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
- One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
- Per page or random header images
- 7 Color Schemes - blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
- Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature

Download from Wordpress.org
Wiki
Royale
Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.

- A fluid-width layout
- Two or three-column
- 3 column layout - side by side or right/left sidebars
- Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
- Translated into thirty-eight languages.
If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.
Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking - smw theme
Starscape
This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.

- Theme Control Panel
- Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
- Customize header logo and background
- Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
- Sidebar customization - left and right or just one -
- Sidebar width options
- A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
- Icon customization
- Date Button for Posts and Pages
- plus even more features

Theme Control Panel

A selection of the built in styles
Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials
Tarski
by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.
This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.

- Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
- You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
- There are a number of different sidebar options
Theme Homepage
Download - Wordpress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum
Ikarus
Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.

- Theme options page and help page in admin
- Live theme preview in admin area
- 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
- Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
- Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
- Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins - popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
- 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
- 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
- 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
- CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
- MooTabs slider box
- Featured YouTube Video post
- Custom typography styles
- and more …,..
Download - Wordpress.org
Homepage and Demo
I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.
Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.
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