Blogly: A Free Personal Blogging Theme For WordPress

Blogly is a new flat style, responsive WordPress theme designed for personal blogging. The design sports bright colors and a traditional blog layout with a left sidebar. Blogly responds nicely on mobile devices and also includes support for post formats.

If your new year’s resolution includes firing up your personal blog again, then Blogly might be a strong option for you. Customization options and feature include:

FontAwesome Icons

Widgetized Areas

Upload Custom Background Images

Theme Customizer

Change Site Colors

Upload Custom Header Logo

Upload Custom Footer Logo

Easily Change Footer Text

Built-In Pagination

Fully Localized Theme for Translation

Blogly-Lite is the free version on WordPress.org and a commercial version is available from ThemeFurnace. For $49 customers will receive additional options such as Google fonts, custom widgets for Dribbble, Social Media, Flickr, Advertising as well as support.

The theme’s author, Oli Dale, says that Blogly is the first of many themes that will be built in the same way:

Blogly is our first in our new generation of WordPress themes which have been re-built from the ground up to be extremely lightweight and easy to use.

One by one, WordPress theme authors are starting to apply the art of minimalism to the administration of their themes in the admin panel, creating fewer options that are easier to use.

All Theme Options Built Into the Customizer

All the options for the theme can be found in the native WordPress theme customizer. Putting everything in the customizer is a growing trend among WordPress theme developers, although many just provide a handful of basic options. That’s why I appreciate the fact that Blogly also adds the ability to upload a site logo.

So far Blogly is one of the most comprehensive themes when it comes to building options into WordPress’ customizer. Dale says he’s committed to building themes like this in the future:

I like the change in approach away from a dedicated options panel, the theme should be a lot easier to customize visually with the theme customizer and I will be doing all my themes this way in future.

Check out a live demo to see Blogly in action or take it for a spin on your own site. You can download Blogly Lite for free from WordPress.org via your WordPress admin themes panel.