Cancel

Sarah Gooding

Eighties: A Bold Free WordPress Theme Focused on Content

WordPress themes are getting simpler and bolder this year. Bloggers are gravitating toward designs that feature large typography and scaled back post meta in order to allow the visitor to focus on the main content. To compliment this design style, many theme developers are opting to keep the peripherals (widgets, menus, etc) hidden from view.

Justin Kopepasah is making his debut in the WordPress Themes Directory with Eighties, a beautiful new theme that epitomizes the simple, bold style trending with new blogging themes. Despite the iconic name, the Eighties theme is not actually a tribute to big hair, leg warmers and the Cold War. Kopepasah said the theme was inspired by his favorite color scheme.

eighties

Eighties was created based on the _s theme by Automattic. It was designed to keep the menu and sidebar out of the way until the visitor toggles them into view.

The theme offers just a couple of customization options to make it your own, including the ability to set your own header and header text color. You can add widgets to the pop out sidebar area or the footer. It ships with the image you see in the header, so making your site look exactly like the demo takes no time at all.

eighties-customizer

Eighties includes support for several Jetpack modules. Portfolios are a unique feature included in this theme if you use Jetpack (coming soon) or blog on WordPress.com. It includes styles for showcasing your projects with the portfolio custom post type.

portfolio

You can check out a live demo of the theme in action at eighties.me.

The Eighties theme was designed to give readers the content they’re looking for without all the extra fluff. Right now, it’s only available for self-hosted WordPress sites but Kopepasah is currently waiting for approval for listing on WordPress.com. You can download Eighties from WordPress.org or install it directly via your theme browser in the WordPress admin.

Category:
Tags:
17

17 responses to “Eighties: A Bold Free WordPress Theme Focused on Content”

  2. Thanks (again) for the mention Sarah!

    The portfolio feature is supposed to release with Jetpack 3.1 and this theme is not on WordPress.com (yet). I’ve been in communication with them and it is harder to get a free theme on WordPress.com than I imagined (seemed like they we nearly ready to publish until I said I wanted to release it as open source). I understand the reason for the hold up, but was surprised by the change of attitude when I mentioned it would be free.

    I do have many plans for Eighties, including adding more customization features (like custom header image on a singular posts/pages). In addition, I am working on add-ons for bbPress, Gravity Forms, Exchange Membership and a couple other plugins I use/like. These will be available as plugins on the WordPress.org repo.

    I really look forward working on and improving Eighties for many moons to come. Stay tuned!

    Create forum topic from comment

    • seemed like they we nearly ready to publish until I said I wanted to release it as open source

      Not quite. :)

      I think there was some confusion about the submission of your theme as it was submitted to us via our channel for premium theme shops. Where it would have wound up in the queue with other premium themes.

      We don’t currently have a submission channel for free themes on WordPress.com. Sometimes people send us themes (like you did!) but usually we just pick the ones we think are the best of the best, comb through them closely to solve any outstanding design, UX, or code issues, and launch them when we’ve updated them. It’s a little different than how the WordPress.org theme directory works.

      That said, this theme is pretty awesome and it’s on our list to launch on WordPress.com. :) Barring any weird issues with it WordPress.com users can expect to see it available there.

      Create forum topic from comment

  4. After looking at the theme, I see a problem – if post doesn’t have a title, there is no way to access single view from the archive listing… I faced similar issue when wanted to make my own theme very clean looking, but had to add meta to the default install, to satisfy this requirement.

    Create forum topic from comment

  5. I like the look of the theme and would love to keep it but is it possible to maybe include options to have a sidebar viewable at all times without clicking on the floating element. Also would like an option to show the full posts on the front page.

    Create forum topic from comment

  6. Hi, I like the theme but I have 2 problems

    First, the header image doesn’t always display, or displays half the image especially if the page is reloaded and I’m scrolling back up the page.

    Second, when I click either of the menu buttons and open the widget, the x close buttons don’t always work. I checked Steve’s site above and his don’t work either.

    Anything I can do to make these things happen?

    Thanks in advance.

    Create forum topic from comment

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.