It finally happened!! After what felt like months of waiting, my WordPress theme that I submitted to the official WordPress Themes Directory finally got approved. Yay! It’s called Quark and it’s a simple and elegant starter theme built on HTML5 & CSS3.
Originally submitted back in February, it took just over 2 weeks before an initial review was made, at which time it wasn’t approved. Unfortunately, I was using some fonts that weren’t 100% GPL Compatible and the grid system I was using was licensed under Creative Commons, which I found out also isn’t GPL Compatible. All themes in the Themes Directory are required to be 100% GPL-licensed, or use a ​GPL-compatible license.
After making the necessary adjustments, I resubmitted the theme a week later. It then took another 6 weeks for the theme to be given another review. After making a few more changes as suggested by the theme reviewer, it was finally given approval in early May. Another week later, it was made live. The whole process took almost 3 months from the initial submission to seeing it live on WordPress.org. It was a long process but also an interesting one, being my first theme submission. It’s been live now, in the WordPress Themes Directory for a little over 4 weeks and has racked up just over 10,000 downloads already.
The theme itself was something that I’d been working on for a few months, in between client work, WordPress meetups, helping organise WordCamp Melbourne and making updates to Easy WP Guide! Quark isn’t a convoluted or confusing framework that’s hard to learn or even harder to modify. It’s a simple and elegant starter theme built on HTML5 & CSS3. It’s based on the Underscores (_s) and TwentyTwelve themes, so not only is it flexible, it’s extremely easy to customise. You don’t need to make a child theme for it (unless you really want to), just dig in to the code & use it to give yourself a kickstart in creating your next awesome theme for yourself or a client. It’s what I’ve been using lately as a starting point for all my theme development.
Its base is a responsive, 12 column grid. It uses Normalize to make sure that browsers render all elements more consistently and Mordernizr for detecting HTML5 and CSS3 browser capabilities along with some default stylings from HTML5 Boilerplate.
It incorporates the awesome Options Framework by Devin Price to make it super easy to add custom Theme Options as well as including over 300 gorgeous, retina friendly icons from the Font Awesome icon font by Dave Gandy.
Quark includes a set of your most common theme templates, including templates for Full-Width pages, Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar (default), Front-Page, Tag, Categories, Authors, Search, Posts Archive and 404. It also supports all the standard WordPress Post Formats, straight out of the box, including Aside, Gallery, Link, Image, Quote, Status, Video, Audio, Chat and of course, your standard post.
If you want to find out some of the other great features of Quark, head on over to the themes homepage, or go check out the theme demo. Better yet, go download Quark and give it a test run yourself and let me know what you think!
