Modern: A Beautiful Free Blog and Portfolio Theme for WordPress

In just one week since its release, the new Modern theme was downloaded nearly 2,700 times from WordPress.org. It was created by WebMan Design, a Slovakia-based company founded by Oliver Juhas. WebMan Design has been selling WordPress themes across multiple marketplaces since 2012 and recently began focusing on producing future-proof themes that meet WordPress.org standards.

Modern is the company’s second free theme on WordPress.org, following the Mustang Lite business theme released last year. It was designed for personal and small business portfolios.

Modern’s bold style incorporates a fullscreen header slideshow that is perfect for showcasing large images with header text. The homepage features your latest blog posts along with an optional sortable portfolio section. The header includes two menu locations for the primary navigation and the social links menu.

All of the customization options for the theme are built into WordPress’ native customizer, including the following:

Add your own 1920 × 1080 header image

Footer widget area

Color picker to set background color, text color, accent color, and accent text color

Customize predefined texts on the homepage

Typography options for setting logo font, heading font, general text font, font subset, basic font size

Modern offers unique styles for each of WordPress’ default post formats. The demo’s style guide page shows that the theme author took many of the smaller details into consideration, including code formatting, blockquotes, lists, table styles, highlighted text style, image alignment, Jetpack Mosaic galleries and more.

The heart icons you see in the single post meta are powered by the free ZillaLikes plugin from ThemeZilla. Modern includes support for Jetpack to manage the portfolio posts, logo image, and uses its featured content module to power the homepage banner. It also includes support for Schema.org markup and Theme Hook Alliance action hooks.

WebMan Design developed the theme with performance in mind and links to Pingdom results of load tests for the demo site. The demo site takes 1.73s to load and gets a 94/100 performance grade.

Check out a live demo of the Modern theme in action. WebMan Design has created extensive documentation for the theme, its various styles, and available third-party plugin integrations. Modern is available for download from WordPress.org or via your admin themes browser.