Wu Wei is a Wordpress theme that was created with clean, modern, minimalism in mind. Information is presented in a logical manner, without any superfluous elements getting in the way. Just like the Taoist concept of wu wei, it’s knowing when to act, and knowing when not to act.

This theme is based on principles of a grid system. You can break out of the grid with css declarations, as seen in this entry.

Live Demo

See Wu Wei in action.

Download

Current Version: 1.2.4 (released 06/01/2009)

Changelog

Version 1.2.4

• Added a readme.html manual
• Deprecated the explicit margin declaration for the right-most widget. Through the use of some CSS trickery, widget stylings are now generalized, so they render correctly by default and no customizing is needed.
• Removed css reset styling for sub and sup (so this becomes browser dependent)
• Added a wordwrap for the pre tag
• Added styling for acronyms, abbreviations, definition lists, and tables
• Fixed an issue with the pull-2 declaration being too large (hat-tip to Kaffe for finding this)
• Fixed the link to comments having a double-slash

Version 1.1.2 (06/01/2009)

• Removed all hard-coded links
• Added “text-transform:lowercase” declarations to the header links

Version 1.1.1 (05/28/2009)

• Moved the default RSS links to the top menu for better access
• Used more generic links (users can customize) at the top

Version 1.1.0 (05/21/2009)

• Updated default sidebar widgets to be more generic
• and added empty links to the menu at top

Features

• Wordpress 2.7+ compatible
• Two colours schemes (light and dark)
• Widget enabled sidebar (or in this case, a bottom bar)
• Supports threaded comments
• SEO Optimized
• Em based layout (!) (scales both horizontally and vertically)
• Validates as XHTML Strict and CSS Level 2.1
• Renders correctly in most major browsers. (Tested in Firefox 3+, Internet Explorer 6.0, Internet Explorer 7.0, Safari 3.0, and Google Chrome).
• GPL-licensed

FAQ

Jeff, how do I get those fancy grey page markers at the top of the menu in the header like you do here?

Easy! Just add the code <?php if(is_page('archives')) {echo 'class="selected"';} ?> (if the link is for “archives”) in the anchor. You’ll need to have “nice” permalinks enabled for this to work. Otherwise, you can just use the page_id instead of the page name.

This issue has been resolved. There is no need to change any widget declarations, as of version 1.2.2.

Ordered/unordered lists in a comment aren’t displaying correctly!

I believe this is an inherent design flaw introduced with threaded comments in Wordpress 2.7. Since comment threads themselves are lists, there is no way to separate a list in a comment, and a comment that’s a list item (aside from introducing extra css declarations). There probably won’t be any support for this, unless the core Wordpress code is changed.

Notes

• Threaded comments — These shouldn’t be nested more than three deep, I’d say, to keep the comment form field from shrinking too much.
• Paged comments — No support for this. Yet. If the demand is there, I’ll figure out a way to add this in.
• More colour schemes — If there are requests for more colour schemes, I’ll add these in too.

Feedback

Feel free to contact me for feedback, feature requests, or support. Be sure to put “Wu Wei Theme” in the subject line.

Screenshots

Light colour scheme

Dark colour scheme