Cover: A Minimalist Blogging Theme for WordPress, Featuring Support for Aesop Story Engine

If you’re looking to bring your blog’s design back to the bare bones of pure content without distractions, then the new Cover theme may be a good option. Cover brings blogging minimalism to a new level. After less than a month on WordPress.org, it has already been downloaded more than 2,500 times.

Cover was created by new WordPress.org theme author Paul Eiche and is based on the popular Underscores starter theme maintained by Automattic.

The theme’s simple, single-column design is accented by support for full-width featured images. It was bundled with Font Awesome to allow users to easily add scalable vector icons to any content or social menu. Cover incorporates the lightweight Headroom.js script for hiding your header until it’s needed. It also includes skrollr.js, a stand-alone parallax scrolling library for mobile (Android + iOS) and desktop.

Cover’s widgets and menus are optional and hidden behind an full-screen overlay triggered by the hamburger icon. This keeps the focus on your content while offering plenty of space for unlimited widgets in the overlay.

Cover’s overlay for widgets and menus

Cover supports one regular navigation menu, one for social media, and an additional social menu in the footer. If you’re using Jetpack’s Infinite Scrolling module, the theme will actually detect whether or not the footer social menu is present and respond accordingly.

The theme was built to make a nice accompaniment to sites using the Aesop Story Engine plugin, although it’s not required. When used with the plugin, content can expand to full-width when using components such as images, galleries, maps, etc.

If you’re a developer wanting to modify the theme, you’ll find that Cover’s stylesheet is compressed. It was built with Sass and the /sass directory includes all the necessary components for compiling the stylesheet.

Cover is a beautifully responsive theme that presents your website in a bold way on any device. Its minimalist design supports your content instead of upstaging it with the clutter of widgets and navigation. Check out a live demo on the theme’s project page to see it in action. Cover is available for free on WordPress.org.