More or Less WordPress Theme

30 Jun 2018 | ~2 minute read

I recently migrated my website away from Ghost and decided to go back to WordPress. Mainly so I didn’t have to maintain a dedicated server for the website. Problem was, I loved the theme I had on my Ghost site, so I wanted to emulate the look at closely as possible.

The Hunt

I didn’t really want to create a new theme from scratch, as that’s a lot of work. So I decided to start hunting for a theme that I could adapt to my needs – it’s much less work and I still get the look I want.

After a lot of hunting, I managed to find a theme called Less, by Jared Erickson. The theme is distributed under the GPL license, when someone asks if they can adapt the theme in the comments, Jared says:

Go for it, as long as you leave credit for the original theme.
Jared Erickson

The Less theme is a great starting point. It’s designed to be minimal and slick. So I got to work making Less look and feel how I needed it to. Here are some of the features and changes I have made to the base theme:

• Improved typography using Google Fonts.
• Fixed colour/font issues with ul/li tags.
• Improved header formatting.
• Changed theme colours.
• Better formatting of blockquotes.
• Added published date to posts.
• Added current year to footer.
• Added FontAwesome support.
• Added support for sub-menus.
• Increased width of main container to 790px.
• Added a 404 page.
• Various small UI updates.

All of those changes have resulted in the site you see before you. A theme I have dubbed More or Less. I have, of course, decided to release More or Less under an open license. I went with Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 4.0.

If you want to use More or Less on your WordPress site, you can download the theme from Github.

• Technology
• Web