Introducing the Blueprint WordPress Theme
September 5th, 2007 | Published in Art and Design, Blueprint | 74 Comments
Download Now! (v0.5)
Blueprint-WP is a new WordPress theme based upon the Blueprint CSS framework. It is built on a grid-based design, cross-browser compatible, easy to change through CSS and has a clean look. And it’s free.
Features
- Built on the new Blueprint CSS framework, thus:
- Easy to change column widths
- Easy to add columns that are cross-browser compatible
- Cross-browser typography and grids
- Small size (~8k)
- WordPress Specific
- Easy to install and modify
- Compatible with WordPress widget function
- WordPress 2.2 compatible
- Design
- Easily modify layout through custom css
- Compatible with all major browsers
- Clean and simple look
- Quick page loading
Installation
- Download the latest version.
- Put the archive in your wp-content/themes directory and extract it.
- Go into your WordPress Admin section, click the “Presentation” tab, and choose the “Blueprint-WP” theme.
- That’s it!
A subversion checkout is coming soon.
Customization
To customize the layout, copy the blueprint/css/custom.sample.css to custom.css and put your CSS overrides there. Then open up blueprint/header.php and uncomment the custom CSS line.
More
Recommended Plugins
Blueprint Theme should work with all WP plugins, but here are a few that I especially recommend:
- Add Meta Tags — Makes you website and posts more search-engine friendly.
- Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form — A quick and easy contact form.
- Search Excerpt — Gives only an excerpt during search, like Google. Blueprint is setup to automatically work with this plugin.
License
This has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. That means you can share it and modify it as long as you keep the link to this site at the bottom of the theme. If you do not want a link at the bottom, please contact me for opportunities.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:41 am (#)
Nice work! (I was wondering how soon someone would jump on this one.) =)
September 5th, 2007 at 1:41 pm (#)
nice one, I was thinking of making a WP theme based on Blueprint myself but you saved me the trouble! There is also one based on the YUI if you have a look on Google… looking forward to checking this out, thanks :)
September 5th, 2007 at 3:45 pm (#)
Simple and gets the job done. I like your theme m8. :)
September 5th, 2007 at 5:15 pm (#)
Well, look who’s going to be a celebrity!
September 10th, 2007 at 11:25 pm (#)
Looks good. Two Suggestions:
1) I’m not sure we need the “.svn” directory thats included in this download. (Side note – It’s hidden by default for Mac users since it begins w/ a period.
2) In file header.php, link tags for the 3 BP css files are missing trailing /> in order to validate.
thanks!
September 11th, 2007 at 9:10 am (#)
Kel,
I thought I deleted the .svn directories. I must have missed one.
Thanks also for the validation note. I don’t care much for validation (heresy, I know), but that’s probably a good change. I’ll make a note for the next version.
Thanks!
September 12th, 2007 at 7:31 pm (#)
hey josh.
i love it as you already know. modified the looks, and now i am happy as can be.
but in header.php i changed this (and recommend it) for the people who are used to click logos instead (or additional) to the nav home link:
changed: div class=column span-12 first id=header onclick=location.href=’/';
September 15th, 2007 at 9:28 am (#)
Excellent work! Very clean and beautiful design. I love it. I’ve been looking to implement a WP theme for my website. I came across your work while I was reading the Blueprint CSS Google Group and was pleasantly surprised to find your theme. I’ll be customizing it as soon as I find some time…
Thanks again for all of your hard work!
September 15th, 2007 at 9:42 am (#)
Jon,
Glad you like it! Be sure to let me know when you customize it so I can see the results.
September 15th, 2007 at 2:34 pm (#)
Hello,
I have a little problem with the image alignment. The images always automatically line up on the left. How can I change that setting?
Many thanks,
September 17th, 2007 at 2:23 am (#)
Waiting for 0.6 release and switchback to em’s and was wondering if you will update your release accordingly — or do i just have to change the lib files?
Have a few more blogs to create the next weeks, simple stuff – no styling, but i try to do the thing that’s less work for me :)
September 17th, 2007 at 9:06 am (#)
Manuel: I might up date it — or I may wait until 1.0. Things are so unstable that I hate to change everything and then change it again. We’ll see.
TM: In posts it should not do that. In other places, you would have to override it in the custom.css, for instance: #sidebar img { float: none; }
September 30th, 2007 at 7:53 am (#)
I have also problem with image placement in post. I can give it align=”right” or align=”left” but it does not resolve problem. Take a look at http://www.adaur.ee/index.php/tonu-toompark/
Image should be in right side of tekst.
October 10th, 2007 at 3:26 am (#)
Thank you.
I was looking for a theme that would work with Internet Explorer 6 too.
It looks very nice and clean.
October 13th, 2007 at 10:38 pm (#)
Thank you! I’m just beginning to play with WordPress and this is a very nice clean theme. :)
October 25th, 2007 at 2:43 am (#)
How can I make the sidebar appear on the left instead of the right of the screen?
January 27th, 2008 at 3:48 pm (#)
how can i display comments on pages? they don’t display after I enable the option for a page. you seem to be doing it on this page…
thanks!
March 13th, 2008 at 12:48 am (#)
I am having problems with forms. When a form box is clicked on the onclick is activated and it takes you to the home page. It has happen in two places, one on the Google groups form and another on a protected post password form. Any suggestions?
March 14th, 2008 at 8:40 am (#)
With the compress.rb and its support for generating semantic classes, it should be really easy to remove all the span-* and such classes from the template content. Could you perhaps do that for the next release?
March 17th, 2008 at 3:40 pm (#)
Quick update.
I managed to figure out these settings for the semantic class names:
plugins:
- fancy-type
- buttons
semantic_classes:
"#header": ".span-12 .first"
"#maincontent": ".span-9 .first"
"#sidebar": ".span-3 .last"
"#nav": ".span-12 .first .large"
I’ve not yet figured out how to harmonize the resulting screen.css file with the blueprint-wp.css though. The layout is funky. It may need custom settings for the grid?
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:22 pm (#)
Hi,
I just wanted to let you know that I’ve added Blueprint-WP to my list of the best WordPress theme available on the net, at http://www.bestwpthemes.com
Great work!
June 21st, 2008 at 6:50 pm (#)
How do you change the color?
August 8th, 2008 at 5:17 am (#)
I’m just wondering if Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is GPL compatible?
August 14th, 2008 at 1:12 pm (#)
hi there,
i can’t upload to wordpress because it doesn’t have tags in the style.css file??
Nadaa
August 15th, 2008 at 1:21 am (#)
Simple and neat! Well done!
September 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm (#)
I noticed that when I first load by blog using this theme, the right sidebar is floating in the middle of the web page and then it moves itself to the right after the main content pages are rendered. This produces an awkward animation affect. I couldn’t seem to figure out how to adjust it so the right sidebar is always floating on the right when loaded.
Thanks!
-Mr
September 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm (#)
Joshua, this is a really great, clean, pretty theme that’s extremely useful for learning both wp themes and blueprint. A really nice jumping off point for me, personally.
seriously great work, much appreciated!
October 15th, 2008 at 7:56 am (#)
haaa, jeje that bark, but very very good theme
October 16th, 2008 at 8:37 am (#)
Hey, I like to leger when I do a search, display the full post?
October 26th, 2008 at 8:44 pm (#)
Great theme. Very professional looking. Exactly the right balance between clean design and functionality.
I’m using it on my blog, with some minor changes to the colors.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:09 pm (#)
I’m using a slightly customized version of your theme over at http://www.binaryleysium.com/blog
Thanks for the awesomeness :)
Any chance you will release an update for WordPress 2.7?
December 8th, 2008 at 10:35 pm (#)
This may be a dumb question but what must you do in order to use a logo in place of just text for the top of the blog?
January 11th, 2009 at 4:13 pm (#)
Excellent work, was looking for something so clean for some time now. Just a question, I must miss something : I want little customization and did what you said, I copied the custom.sample.css to custom.css, edited it and then uncommented the line in the header.php file but nothing changes.
February 5th, 2009 at 5:34 am (#)
Very clean without being sterile. I wonder how hard it would be to give it left-hand navigation?
A Stumble for your efforts.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:19 am (#)
I too cannot get the header logo to work. Slightly discouraging. Great work otherwise!
February 24th, 2009 at 10:39 am (#)
I figured out the problem…you have to change the loading order of your stylesheets in header.php so that custom.css loads first and therefore overrides other css.
Thanks!
April 10th, 2009 at 9:23 pm (#)
Cheers! I used the BluePrint theme as the basis for my redesigned blog. Thanks for a great starting point.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:35 pm (#)
Does anyone have any idea how to tweak this to show submenus? I’m running wp-e-commerce and would like the children of the Store page to show when that’s selected.
April 19th, 2009 at 6:37 am (#)
Hello,
I’ve converted blueprint them into a blogger template, hope u dont mind.
http://naeemnur.blogspot.com/2009/04/blogger-template-blueprint.html
April 29th, 2009 at 12:39 am (#)
Hi, how do you change the background color of the theme? I can’t seem to find anyhow…thanks!
May 26th, 2009 at 7:17 pm (#)
hi, I just used your theme and it really is excellent..simple but manageable…just what I need!
More wordpress users should know about your theme template!
Thanks! Thanks!
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 am (#)
thanks dude! i dig this thing – its clean, simple, easy.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm (#)
This is one of my favourite themes. Playing with the CSS gives you lots of options in terms of fonts and colors. Thank you for sharing. A Stumble for your work :)
October 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm (#)
Is there something with this theme that messes up tables? Everytime I try to use a table it automatically makes the border grey and I can’t have a table without a border etc….
November 30th, 2009 at 12:14 pm (#)
I would love a version of this theme to have some quick Theme Options for columns.
March 5th, 2010 at 6:40 am (#)
Great template. Simple and elegant looking
March 10th, 2010 at 1:28 pm (#)
I just fell in love with this theme. I will be using it right away :D
March 29th, 2010 at 3:51 am (#)
Clean and nice looking! Very sensible layout.
Thank you for the good work!
March 29th, 2010 at 7:26 pm (#)
look nice
thanks for framework wordpress theme
May 10th, 2010 at 8:15 pm (#)
thanks, pren. very nice and very useful post.
May 29th, 2010 at 3:57 pm (#)
I like the simplicity of this theme and green is also my favourite color. What sort of arrangement do you want done to have the footer link removed ? Just wondering.
Good luck in the future with both your own blog and theme developments.
July 7th, 2010 at 11:49 am (#)
Thanks for that nice Theme. Installed it on my new site. If anyone needs the located german version, just say yay! ;)
July 16th, 2010 at 3:27 am (#)
Very nice work. Love the crisp clean set out of the theme. Look forward to more of your work.
October 14th, 2010 at 11:47 am (#)
This is one of my favorite theme, its clean and work with Internet Explorer 6 too, here in Romania many peoples use IE6, thank you for your theme.
October 25th, 2010 at 2:18 pm (#)
Thanks for that nice Theme. Installed it on my new site. If anyone needs the located german version, just say yay!
December 28th, 2010 at 9:23 am (#)
thanks alot …
pretty clean theme … stumbled upon this after searching for a similar theme for 2 3 hours !!!
January 7th, 2011 at 4:34 pm (#)
Where would I place adsense in this theme.
Thanks
February 7th, 2011 at 6:57 pm (#)
Very simple and elegant theme. I will do some more tweaks in this theme.
Thanks for sharing.
February 16th, 2011 at 1:27 pm (#)
Hi Josh
Your theme is awesome! Much better than lot of commercial themes out there. I’ll be using this Theme on my new sites.
Thanks
Jack
February 24th, 2011 at 1:34 pm (#)
Thanks for sharing such a nice Theme. Going to Install it.
March 27th, 2011 at 11:11 am (#)
Will try this out, looks pretty good.
April 16th, 2011 at 6:05 am (#)
Thanks for that nice Theme. Installed it on my new site. If anyone needs the located german version, just say yay!
May 9th, 2011 at 5:53 pm (#)
Its a nice theme, clean and simple. I would like display excerpts in categories, instead of the entire post. How can I do this?
May 9th, 2011 at 5:57 pm (#)
Or even just the titles..
June 13th, 2011 at 3:08 am (#)
I’ve set up my site so that in “Reading Settings”, “Front page displays” is set to a static page.
I selected a page called “Home”.
Trouble is, when I view the site it has two “Home” buttons in the nav bar.
I can get rid of the extra button by setting “Home” to private, but when I view the page the
title reads “Private:Home”.
How do I sort this out ?
Cheers
Mark
September 26th, 2011 at 4:55 pm (#)
How can I make the sidebar appear on the left instead of the right of the screen?
October 30th, 2011 at 11:58 pm (#)
Advanced thanks to this theme. I made a new travel site using blueprint framework so easy.
Check our site: http://hotelkeys.us.
Thanks again to Mr. Joshua.
November 23rd, 2011 at 8:02 pm (#)
Thanks for sharing such a nice Theme. Going to Install it. greetings johanna
January 25th, 2012 at 9:36 am (#)
Thanks dude … Blueprint will serve greatly as an example for creating a new theme ;)
February 2nd, 2012 at 12:32 am (#)
Hello,
I don’t understand how to make the comment template appear at the bottom of a page.
I need to do exactly what you have on this page.
Can you please help me?
Thanks in advance.
best regards
sandro
February 22nd, 2012 at 3:26 pm (#)
Simple and neat! Well done! THX Hanna
March 29th, 2012 at 2:15 am (#)
Another fine article with sage advice, please keep them coming
July 26th, 2012 at 3:04 pm (#)
thats a realy nice Theme dude
December 30th, 2012 at 10:40 am (#)
I join. ӏ agree with told all above.