For the past few years, the holy grail for many WordPress theme makers is to create a theme that is easy for anyone to customize without touching a line of code. One of the most difficult aspects of site customization is building the layout, especially if you’re shooting for a responsive website.
Make is a new free theme that landed in the WordPress Themes Directory last night. It’s geared toward making it easy for you to design your own site with very basic level WordPress skills. Created by the folks at The Theme Foundry, Make is unique in that it comes with a page builder packaged into the theme.
The theme has a host of options built into the customizer which allow you to easily customize the background, layouts, fonts, colors, and logo. In addition to the customizer controls, Make includes a page builder for designing your own layout.
When you add a new page, you’ll see the option to add text, blank, banner and/or gallery sections as building blocks for your page. Stack the sections on top of each other in any order to create a unique design.
Make enables you to build almost any kind of site from portfolios to magazines to e-commerce. It’s also built to be compatible with popular plugins like Woo Commerce, Gravity Forms and Jetpack. The theme’s homepage has several live demos of different sites built using the drag-and-drop page builder.
The Theme Foundry is pursuing the freemium business model with Make in order to promote Make Plus, which adds commercial features such as custom builder sections for WooCommerce, widgets, post lists, quick start builder page template designs and more customization options. The basic Make theme with the page builder is available for free from WordPress.org. Search for ‘Make’ in the theme browser and then sort by newest to download it.
This isn’t anything new. PageLines, CyberChimps, and others have been offering features like this for years now on WordPress.org.