May was an excellent month for free WordPress themes landing in the official Themes Directory. Several dozen were approved and added to the directory last week in one sweep. We’ve hand-picked some of the best themes released in the month of May, all of which have undergone the rigorous review process conducted by the Theme Review Team. Grab a coffee or tea and start bookmarking your favorites.
Themify Base
Themify Base is a minimalist style blog theme from the folks at Themify. It’s translation ready, includes one custom menu, a sidebar, and three footer widget areas. The theme options contain six different skins and multiple layouts for the index, archives, pages, and posts.
Tracks
Tracks is a bold, beautiful theme designed for use on personal blogs. Making your site look just like the demo takes no time, as it features just a handful of options in the WordPress customizer. The theme looks its best with large, panoramic featured images in place for each post. It also includes a customized author section that will display social links and a bio for each author at the bottom of posts.
Link
Link based on Bootstrap and is an adaptation of the “Link” theme by Blacktie.co. It features big full-width images and full-width colored sections. The theme is actually a child theme of the Flat Bootstrap theme created by Tim Nicholson. Link includes support for customer header images, multiple widget areas, and Font Awesome icons.
tdPersona
tdPersona is a beautiful theme with a clean, simple design. This minimal style theme has support for all of the standard post formats and includes a unique header menu for navigating them. A hidden sidebar widget area slides out when activated by an unobtrusive icon in the top menu.
Forceful Lite
Forceful Lite is a free theme suited to magazines, blogs and news sites. It includes multiple widget areas as well as the ability to create your own unique sidebars and assign them to individual posts/pages. The theme is packaged with 14 custom widgets for customizing the display of recent content, advertising, social links, and more.
Carrot Lite
The Carrot Lite homepage sports a magazine-style design with a large welcome message that can be easily edited in the customizer. The theme includes footer and sidebar widget areas and support for Font Awesome icons.
Fictive
Fictive is a beautiful free theme from Automattic, designed for bloggers. It can be customized with your own header, Gravatar and social links in the sidebar, which can be set to fixed or scroll. Fictive features post formats with different colors and icons for each.
Make
Make is Theme Foundry’s first free WordPress theme. It includes a unique drag and drop page builder that makes it easy for anyone to customize the layout. The design can be further customized with your own background, fonts, colors, and logo. Make can be used as a base for nearly any kind of website, including portfolios, blogs, businesses, e-commerce, or magazine sites.
Pictorico
Pictorico is a single-column, grid-based portfolio theme created by the folks at Automattic. It’s well-suited to photoblogging or portfolio sites that feature large images. The theme can be customized with your own background and header. Pictorico also includes a post slider and support for post formats and sticky posts.
Quality
Quality is a business theme with a custom blog and homepage template. The options include the ability to upload your own logo and header image. Quality supports Font Awesome icons which are featured in the homepage services section and can be easily edited in the theme’s options.
A great month for free themes. I would like to mention our theme Slipstream here. It is a fully responsive free blogging theme. I am using it on my own personal blog. I hope Tavern readers would find it simple and useful.