• Whiteboard Theme by Brian Purkiss
• Starkers Theme by Elliot J. Starker
• Starter Theme by Dan Philibin
• Wordpress Naked by Siftware
• Sandbox Theme by Scott Allan Wallick & Andy Skelton
• Cutline Theme by tubetorial

While these are great resources, starter themes have issues. First off, you’ll want to check the licenses associated with each of these themes listed. Also, if a theme isn’t updated for 2.7 functionality you may have to do some editing on your own.

If you’ve got any other themes to share, post a comment and we’ll add them in for you.

The first thing you need to do is create a new file called category.php. Wordpress automatically checks for this file and if it exists it will use this file to show category pages instead of archive.php. After you create your category.php page place the following code inside it:

<?php
/**
 * @package WordPress
 * @subpackage Default_Theme
 */

get_header(); ?>

	<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

	<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

		<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

			<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
				<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
				<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>

				<div class="entry">
					<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
				</div>

				<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?></p>
			</div>

		<?php endwhile; ?>

		<div class="navigation">
			<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?></div>
			<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
		</div>

	<?php else : ?>

		<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
		<p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
		<?php get_search_form(); ?>

	<?php endif; ?>

	</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now all you have to do is save the file and when you go to one of your category pages it will now use this file instead of archive.php. To customize, just edit category.php to your liking. If you are using my Show Every Post On Your Category Page tip don’t forget to edit it accordingly! Also, if you have a customized theme you can just copy your entire index.php file in your themes folder into the new category.php.

If you’ve got a theme that isn’t making use of widgets, it isn’t a hard task to make the theme widget-ready. All it requires is a bit of code to be inserted into the areas you want to widgetize, and creating/editing a functions.php file of your theme.

First Step is to find where you want to add widgets. The most popular area is the sidebar of a blog or site. If that is the case, you’d open your sidebar.php file of your theme, and insert this code after your main sidebar div:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar("Sample Sidebar") ) : ?>

*Make note of the ‘Sample Sidebar’, that is what you’re going to need to carry over. You can put whatever you’d like in this area, but it’s best to be descriptive so that you can see what area this is corresponding to later on if you decide to edit it again.

Next, place this piece of code just before the end of the sidebar div:

<?php endif; ?>

What you just did was instruct Wordpress to look and see if you’ve enabled any widgets in your themes options and to display them if you did. If not, whatever is between the 2 lines of code we entered is displayed in the sidebar.

Now we need to open your functions.php file of your theme (if you do not have a functions.php file, you can just make a new one). In this file enter the following code:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Sidebar Sample',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
?>

Please note that where it says ‘Sample Sidebar’, you need to match this up to what you entered above in Step 1. The values of before_title and after_title do just what they look like they’d do, they put what is in the hash marks after the title of the widget. Same goes for before_widget and after_widget.

If you’d like to have multiple sidebar widget areas (or even in other places) just make sure to add another if ( function … statment like the one we defined and be sure to give it a different name.

And that’s it. It wasn’t that hard at all. You can now go to your Admin Panel, find the “Appearance > Widgets” section and start adding widgets at your leisure.