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Sarah Gooding

Moments: A Free Responsive WordPress Theme With Post Formats Support

The folks at Site5 have just added a new theme to their growing collection of free WordPress themes. Moments is a new personal blogging theme that allows you to record your life with beautifully designed post formats. It also responds nicely to mobile devices.

moments

Features included in the Moments theme are geared toward making it easy for you to personalize your site. A few of the highlights include:

  • Widget ready sidebar
  • Support for all Post Formats
  • Custom Logo and Favicon support
  • Custom fonts via Google Webfont typography options
  • Built-in Pagination
  • Social icons
  • jQuery PrettyPhoto Lightbox
  • Built-in thumbnail regeneration

View a live demo to see Moments in action.

SIte5 offers the demo XML for download so that you can try the theme with the demo content in place. Moments, like all Site5 themes, comes with excellent documentation. As a hosting company, they probably understand the value of documentation in mitigating the number of support requests related to common problems. I’m guessing that’s also why they’ve built thumbnail regeneration into the theme, since that tends to be a frequent issue for users when activating new themes. Site5 also offers a support forum, should you have any issues with the theme.

If you decide to use this theme, I would not recommend using the Stat Code option in the theme settings. It’s better to put Google analytics or other tracking codes in a plugin for data portability. When you change themes it’s too easy to forget that your tracking code was in the theme settings.

With all the discussion lately about why more people don’t make use of post formats, it’s refreshing to see themes showcase this feature in a beautiful way. Perhaps WordPress themes with well-designed post formats will inspire more users to learn how to use them in blogging. Moments does a nice job of spotlighting this feature. You can download the theme for free from Site5.

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10 responses to “Moments: A Free Responsive WordPress Theme With Post Formats Support”

  1. Search “post formats” for 210 themes, on the official WordPress site.

    Sarah pointed out:

    With all the discussion lately about why more people don’t make use of post formats, it’s refreshing to see themes showcase this feature in a beautiful way.

    I was quizzical about that earlier post Sarah mentions, when it first came out. It said:

    No, Post Formats haven’t gone anywhere but theme support and their use appear to be waning.

    Several months ago, I decided to lay in a small stack of themes on my test-site, especially selected to educate myself about “post formats”, the difference with custom formats, and related topics. I had no problem ‘swamping’ myself with a widely-diversified inventory of themes promising to showcase different ways to approach & utilize the post format feature. In fact, I had to ‘discipline’ myself, not to go full-on ‘kid in a candy store’.

    So I returned just now to the WordPress.org Themes download page, and performed the search linked at the top of this comment. There are 26 pages of search-results, each with 8 themes matching the search-criteria, and 1 additional page with 2 more. Glancing through the pages and making note of the submission-dates for these themes, they are generally quite recent.

    I tallied the year-dates for these 210 “post formats” enabled themes:

    2008 – 1
    2009 – 11
    2010 – 11
    2011 – 20
    2012 – 61
    2013 – 90
    2014 – 16

    Regrettably, I did not keep an eye on the 2014 month-day dates, since if they were all in January, that means we are tracking on 192 new Post Formats themes, for this coming year.

    That late-breaking trend-indication could be further-checked, by looking at the month-tallies for the end of 2013.

    In round numbers, it looks we’re probably in the midst of an explosion of Post Formats-supporting theme-development.

    Now … if I can only figure out what post formats are! ;)

    Create forum topic from comment

    • Post Formats are, at their very essence, a taxonomy. (A taxonomy is just “a way to classify similar things”.) As a taxonomy, post formats are analogous to categories and post tags. Unlike categories and post tags, which classify posts according to the content or topic of a post, post formats classify posts according to the type of information/data in the post: an image, a video, an audio file, etc. – regardless of the content or topic of the post.

      But post formats are more than just a taxonomy. They have some extra fanciness built in to make them easier to use in creative ways by Theme developers, and easier to expose in the Theme. The main problems with post formats are two-fold, but related:

      1) No consistent way to store meta data associated with a given post format
      2) No consistent user interface for the user to enter meta data associated with a given post format

      The changes to core originally slated for WordPress 3.6, but ripped out at the very last minute (during beta), were aimed at resolving those two issues. Until they are resolved, I don’t think we’ll see widespread user adoption of post formats, even as more and more Themes incorporate them into their design.

      Create forum topic from comment

      • Thank you, Chip! This is the kind of discussion of Post Formats, or other tech-‘mysteries’, that I like to see.

        I’m not on my dev-platform right now, but can get a start on my response to Mr. Bennett’s reply. I’d like to point to some additional specifics, a little later when I have my test-site up.

        Chip Bennett authors the WordPress theme, Eonology. It is installed on my localhost site (with a few dozen others). Why Eonolgy?

        [Eonology is] intended to serve as a base for child Themes and as an educational reference for Theme development using WordPress functions, action/filter hooks, and template tags. Oenology includes built-in breadcrumb navigation, and supports the Theme Customizer, Contextual Help, Post Formats, Navigation Menus, Post Thumbnails, Custom Backgrounds, Custom Image Headers, and Custom Editor Style. [emph. added]

        Eonolgy is a learning-aid, and it does Post Formats. I had been using the ‘official’ Toolbox theme, as an educational tool … but then it disappeared from the WordPress repository. I picked it for my main work-theme, in hopes that being produced by WordPress, it would be updated & stable.

        While I understand “Post” as a record in a table in the database, I’m unclear what the Post Format innovation does (creates?) that is different. I will be on my dev-system this morning, and will look at the template files for Eonology, and prepare to track how WordPress knows that a given record/Post has been modified (?) to have a Post Format status.

        Create forum topic from comment

    • A Post Format is a theme feature … a piece of meta information…

      Yes, and a Piston is a feature of a heat-engine that converts thermal energy to linear thrust. But from that “information”, it would be impossible to identify a piston laying among objects on a workbench … much less create one or know how to ‘enhance’ an engine with it.

      Before long, I will be able to Seahawks the Post Formats Quiz.

      But spot one in a Police lineup of data-objects? Beautify & enrich a website with one (beyond clicking a radio button)? Um … let me get back to you on that. ;)
      =====

      In all candor, folks, I think I’m pointing to the actual “problem” that Post Formats is experiencing. They are presented & discussed in an abstracted fashion, leaving people to watch each other for cues as they alternately nod & shake their heads.

      They aren’t being adopted & used by end-users, because treatments of the topic lack … accessibility.

      Create forum topic from comment

  5. I’ve been a big fan of Site5’s themes. I’ve used many of these across my blogs over the past few years. This one really looks like one of their best.

    Though, I’m not sure how much of the post format features I’m going to use!

    Create forum topic from comment

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