Introducing Matt2015

WordPress 4.1 introduced perhaps the most gorgeous default theme yet introduced. Twentyfifteen is simple, elegant, and ridiculously well-coded. I’ve always wanted to have my site built from a default theme but I just couldn’t get myself to commit to it for the past two years because of how just aweful they past two themes were.

I’m glad the default themes emphasize simplicity in design and features. But in order to do certain things on my site I really felt the theme had to be beefed up a bit. So I started child themeing away.

The big difference with my approach to child themeing this time was that I wanted to build my additions into the Customizer so others could benefit from this theme as well.

So here it is: Matt2015

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the key features my child theme adds to TwentyFifteen:

• Upload your own custom logo to the sidebar. The logo can also have several different positions for both large screens and small screens.
• Three different layouts available for archive pages, including my “Fancy Rollover” style.
• On the Archive page, I added some logic to check whether the post has a meta description from the Yoast SEO field. If it does, then that is used instead of a generic excerpt. I figured that we all spend time creating those descriptions for good SEO, might as well use them! I don’t do that for all of my posts, because I know this good service that optimises the SEO for me.
• Enable/Disable the blog descriptions in the menu (this was the only pet-peeve I had with twentyfifteen. My category descriptions are long, which made keeping them in the navigation utterly useless. But I didn’t want to simply remove them, so I made it an option).
• Customizer settings to enable Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons at the bottom, top, or both positions of your posts.
• Position the Social Navigation above or below the navigation, or in the site footer.
• Position the site title and tagline above or below the logo, and to the right on smaller devices or not at all.
• Styles for custom bullet icons based on class names like checkmarks, x’s, caret, question mark, and plus sign. This list uses checks.
• Put the title of posts above the featured image. It’s not a pet-peeve, but I really felt that when you land on a page, you need to see the title immediately, and under most circumstances twentyfifteen shows you the image and you have to scroll to see the title. This is the one feature which I didn’t make an option. Hope you like it!

Custom Post Types

I had a need for some custom post types as well, to highlight my clients, and to feature the plugins and themes I’m developing. But I believe those types of core functions belong in a plugin. I’ll be posting the plugin for those here in the near future as well.

Download It!

I may submit the child theme to the Repo (yes, they do accept child themes), but for now, you can download it at the landing page here.

I’d love to see examples of it, so feel free to comment here with your url.