After months of plugging away at in during whatever free time we’ve been able to find, we’re finally releasing it into the wild today, to coincide with WordCampNYC 2009. (In fact, I’m heading over to that conference later today, and Allan will be speaking there early this afternoon, so if you’re there, be sure to say hello.) It’s available right now for purchase at this link — for a limited time only, it costs just US$45, which is less than half the price of other, far less awesome WordPress themes, if you ask me.
But Wait, There’s More
You can head over to Basicmaths.subtraction.com to play with a live demo of the theme, peruse the documentation, and read just about everything you need to know about what makes it special (be sure to click on the VIEW buttons), but here’s are just three of its coolest aspects:
1. Grid Classes in Session
This theme is all about displaying your content in the most stunning way possible, and the core of that is a flexible layout grid that informs the layout of every element. We put a tremendous amount of effort into engineering a suite of CSS classes that work with the grid to make image placement painless. You can see for yourself how flexible this infrastructure is on this blog post, which painstakingly details how to assign classes to images to get the placement you want.
2. Magic Grid View
To make placement of images even easier, be sure to hit CTRL+SHIFT+G on any page within the demo to automagically reveal the grid view — incredibly handy for positioning content!
3. OMG, Color!
Basic Maths is an evolution of the design you see here at Subtraction.com, but it makes a dramatic departure in at least one way: color! The sensibility is still very minimalist, but users can enter any hex color value into a simple theme option within WordPress and change up the color scheme for the theme instantly. It’s pretty neat.
Theme Park
Allan and I started this project almost a year ago, so I’m incredibly happy to see it finally launch. I can’t say enough how much its very existence is a direct result of Allan’s tireless perfectionism; it got designed because of me, but it got awesome — and real — because of Allan. Also, I have to thank my good friend Erin Sparling for helping us out at the last minute when we ran into bugs with the grid view toggling feature mentioned above. He re-wrote the entire feature for us in record time, and really helped us preserve what was for us one of the most unique and critical parts of the theme.
As I mentioned, Basic Maths is a pretty good representation of what this site might look like if I were to redesign it today. When Allan and I got it up and running for the first time, I nearly didn’t want to package it up for public consumption, because I like it so much. All of which is to say that I think it’s really, really special, and if you’re in the market for a blog theme, I think you’ll agree.
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