Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try

Over the last months, one of the regular problems mentioned with the Indieweb on WordPress is the lack of compatible themes. Most themes do not properly mark up their content in microformats, or support some of the customizations that would integrate with Indieweb plugins.

I had already been working on my fork of the WordPress stock Twenty-Sixteen theme, called IW26. In my changing of the theme, I tried to limit being opinionated to the markup and plugin integration and leave the design to be mostly unchanged. On the backend, update the theme with any improvements to WordPress core and backdate any improvements made to _s, the starter theme that many WordPress themes are based on.

Independent Publisher is a popular theme that began adding microformats and Indieweb support. I had contributed to the theme. But development seems to be over and I haven’t gotten a response from the developer.

So, after much consideration, I decided to fork the theme. The Indieweb version, called Indieweb Publisher, strips out many of the specialty features the original theme had.  It is still an evolving work, but it is good enough for daily use.

What was removed:

• Excerpt Options – Switched to only the decision as to whether to have an excerpt on front/archive pages. The type of excerpt to generate seems to me to be strictly plugin territory.
• Multi-Author Mode – This was replaced with the Indieweb plugin’s setting for whether a site is a single or multi-author site.
• Social icons menu – Again, seems like plugin territory to me.
• Custom header used as a logo

What was added

• Basic support for the Syndication Links, Simple Location, and Post Kinds plugins.
• Option to show time on posts, not just date
• Option to hide category display.
• Custom logo feature to replace adaptive use of custom header
• Genericons Neue replaced Genericons font set
• Privacy Policy link if enabled in WordPress
• Archive title and description functions and filters replaced custom coded functions
• H-Card template page that can be used as front page
• Set rel-feed if front page is not feed.
• Footer widget
• Switch to SASS for CSS generation
• Replaced custom navigation with navigation from core implemented in WordPress 4.1
• Started removing styling on microformats classes

Still being worked on is importing the Independent Publisher 2 layout that appears on WordPress.com and letting this be an alternate layout option, as well as taking full advantage of SASS file generation to remove duplication. I actually like the look of IP2 as well.

So, give it a try, give feedback and suggestions, and I’ll continue to iterate on both themes. You can download it from Github in a zip file and upload it to your site.

Someday, it may be worthy of an upload to the wordpress.org repo