Politics is a new free theme on WordPress.org designed to support politicians, campaigns, causes, and government agencies. The theme was created by Jami Gibbs, author of the Gateway theme and founder of Rescue Themes. After just three days on WordPress.org, it is already active on more than 700 sites.
Politics features a homepage template with customizable sections, including a header with contact info, hero slider, featured posts, and a parallax content section. All of these sections are managed within the customizer along with options to upload a logo, set the blog layout (masonry or traditional), and customize basic theme colors. The theme also includes support for five footer widget areas.
Additional theme features (such as the email signup form and donations) are added via the following recommended plugins: Give, Mailbag, Rescue Shortcodes, Jetpack, and Widget Importer & Exporter.
Politics is based on Zurb’s Foundation and Underscores. It responds nicely to mobile devices for visitors checking out a campaign on the go.
You can view a live demo of Politics on the Rescue Themes website with all the features enabled. A commercial version of the theme is available with additional sidebars, typography customization options, and WooCommerce support.
The American political season is in full swing, but Gibbs didn’t create Politics with upcoming elections in mind. She designed it as a followup to her Legislator theme, which has been successful on Themeforest.
“I’m sure the upcoming election year crossed my mind but I think it might actually be a little late for the political theme peak for this election cycle,” Gibbs said.
“I imagine most politicians would have already sorted out their websites by now. I was really just looking for a compliment to my other political theme, Legislator. I noticed that there weren’t any political themes on the WordPress theme directory so I was focusing on that underserved audience,” she said.
So far Gibbs has had success pursuing niche themes for nonprofits, politics, breweries, and e-commerce. She is one of the few Themeforest authors trying to make a difference by adhering to WordPress best practices.
You can download Politics for free from WordPress.org. Demo content to populate it is available on Rescue Themes’ website along with comprehensive documentation.
Interesting idea for a theme, but there’s something wrong with the stats on wordpress.org. They say it’s only been downloaded about 300 times, so how it lists “active installs” at 700+ is a bit of a mystery.