Theme Browser

When looking for WordPress themes- it’s not enough to just look at the “look” or pretty pictures. There is a lot more to a theme than the css. While the basic 2 themes in WordPress work- and are guaranteed to do the job in any browser- almost everyone want’s to be different, to have their own little image in the world of the web- and because it’s pretty easy to tinker with the theme- people do- some that know what they are doing- and others that have no clue. Some tinkers shouldn’t put their themes out for public consumption.
As WordPress gets more features there are more opportunities to miss something in creating a theme. One of the “Favorite” themes these days is “Connections”- which doesn’t include categories for links. This can be a real bummer for those who have a lot of links in different categories. Many themes don’t include the next and previous post once you click the permalink headline and end up at the posts hard link location- where you can comment- this is a nice navigation aid that should be included to avoid back navigation but isn’t in many themes.

The Theme browser I like best right now is the one at www.themes.wordpress.net in Filmstrip mode. It gives you a chance to see how the theme handles a lot of formatting issues including the “More” tag and the above mentioned “categories” in links. It also shows ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes within blockquotes and subcategories.

The only thing missing is the ability to search by theme name, so you can review a theme quickly. Granted if you know the name you can search elsewhere to take a look, but it would be handy to have that ability built in.

One day someone will build a theme browser that also allows for reviews, comments, feature list searches- complete with plug-in links for the themes that you need- but for now, this is the bomb.