My experience creating and using The Clean Blog - my first WordPress theme built for clean design, readability, and blogging simplicity.
Hello everyone,
Credits
This WordPress Theme wouldn’t have seen the light without:
- the Clean Blog template by David Miller
- the starter theme Underscores by Automattic
- and our beloved CMS WordPress
About
Users, like I was a long time ago, tend to search for themes with ‘cool’ functionalities to make their websites stand out without knowing the real cost (performance, accessibility, best practices, search engine optimization, and so on…) of the ‘bling-bling’ they are using… Two years ago, when The Clean Blog was released (in 2017), I was not aware of those critical facts and developed it with a user mindset… Today (in 2019), after two more years of diving, learning and improving, I can’t just sit back and let even a few hundreds of people use a bloated theme with a lot of ‘bling-bling’ functionalities! As developers improve, they don’t feel shy or ashamed at all to point users in the right direction(s) for a better experience and a better Web even if this mean hours of developing are going to be wasted ( not really because we learn from our mistakes ) and gone with the wind… Users are always free to switch from a theme to any other one, but for me, as a conscientious developer, I have to make the best decisions concerning my code for the web and the users experience… In short, the new theme is much more well coded and to be very honest is not bloated like the old one…
Usage
1- To use this theme, you have to download it from the WordPress themes repository and add it under Appearance→Themes→Add New→Upload Theme, or search for The Clean Blog under Appearance→Themes→Add New in the backend.
2- Since the theme is Bootstrap based, I've wrote a lightweight JavaScript plugin, bsWalker.js , to take care of multilevel dropdown navigation. To create an item link with children:
- go to Appearance→Menus in the backend
- create a Custom Link
- in URL type #
- in Link Text type the label of your choice
- put children links under this custom link
- in Menu Settings, under the created menu, choose Primary as location and save your menu
- nothing more to do, that's it! 😁
3- In the Customizer (Appearance→Customize or Customize link in the Admin Bar), you'll find a panel named The Clean Blog Theme and four sections (for now: Homepage Header Slider, Featured Image Display, Footer Social Sites Links and Footer Copyright Area) under it. Under each section, controls are explained in details. Note that the third section Header Image is only for the home page, each post and page can have their own header image by assigning a Featured image to the post or the page.
4- The only plugin I've used is slabText by Brian McAllister to control the size of the site title, so don't worry if your site title is long, it will be big and bold ✨
5- The Clean Blog (TCB) is a Responsive WordPress theme, perfect for personal or company blogs.
Feedback?
Head over the support page to tell me if you’re having some issues or if you wish to see some features added to the theme 😉 You can also leave a review on the reviews page to give me a push 👍 Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Final word
I really hope that this theme will be useful for a lot of WordPress users and that they'll enjoy using it. I'll be making improvements to TCB from time to time, so don't worry, and be talking about it here, so stay tuned!
