I registered the domain themelets.com several months ago (way back in August of last year) in the hopes of one day making a WordPress child theme “portal” of sorts. I started working on it off and on for the past few weeks, and earlier today I finally got it ready.

On the site you can find information on the latest WordPress child theme releases, announcements regarding many popular theme frameworks, along with tutorials and other resources.

Yeah, I know the site is pretty much dominated by Thematic child themes at the moment, but in time maybe we’ll see more variety of child themes spanning across different frameworks.

Don’t worry, I’m not jumping ship from Theme Lab to start posting about new child themes all day. Think of it as a sister blog to complement the content here.

So go on and check out Themelets and let me know what you think in the comments.

I recently came across a pretty cool plugin called Theme Tweaker, which basically lets you alter the colors of your theme without touching your CSS code. I thought I would go over this plugin in a review post. In this review, you’ll learn:

• How to install the plugin in WordPress 2.7+
• How to identify and change various colors to your liking
• How to update your stylesheet with changes
• How to generate a custom child theme on the fly

And now, onto the review…

Read the rest of this entry »

If you like one column themes, then you may have seen Compact theme here at Theme Lab. This is a very simple theme, and is great for building child themes off of. I made two quick examples that get rid of the magenta background image and replace it with solid background colors.

Live Demo | Download

Live Demo | Download

Remember, you’ll need the original Compact theme uploaded to your themes directory before these child themes will work. You can use these child themes to alter the solid background color to a light or dark color of your choice.

This is a first here at Theme Lab, a free WordPress child theme, or themelet. After receiving some very nice feedback over at my personal blog, I have decided to release it here. All this child theme consists of is a directory with a single stylesheet in it. This stylesheet overrides a few lines of CSS in the parent theme to alter the color scheme, as well as change up the header a bit. Everything else is handled by Thematic, so you’ll need this theme uploaded to your WordPress theme directory as well.

Live Demo | Download