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.

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
  • Validates as XHTML Strict and CSS Level 3
  • Renders cor­rectly in major browsers.
  • GPL-licensed

Live Demo

See Wu Wei in action.

Download

Current Version: 2.4

Due to the fact that ver­sion 2.x requires dif­fer­ent CSS code for things such as break­ing out of the grid, I’ve put up a legacy ver­sion of Wu Wei 1.2.4 if you wish to keep the old functionality.

Changelog

Version 2.4 (2012–01-03)

  • Fixed a bug with the page title sep­a­ra­tor show­ing up in the wrong place. (Thanks to Ashley Grealish for catch­ing this)

Version 2.3 (2011–08-22)

  • Custom header and cus­tom back­ground inte­gra­tion — eas­ily change the appear­ance within the dash­board, with­out need­ing to know any CSS
  • Custom menu man­age­ment — cre­ate cus­tom menus com­bin­ing posts, pages, cat­e­gories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets
  • Several under-the-hood updates to bring the theme in line with cur­rent WordPress 3.x standards.
  • Fixed the issue of list styling in comments
  • Changed the man­ual from readme.html to readme.txt

Version 1.2.4 (06–01-2009)

  • 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

FAQ

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

Note: this applies to ver­sion 1.2.4 and below, as mark­ers were removed for bet­ter menu func­tion­al­ity in ver­sion 2.3.

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.

My wid­gets in the bot­tom side­bar are overflowing!

Not to worry. Simply change the “margin-right:0px” dec­la­ra­tion from .widget_categories to the class of your right-most widget.

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.

This has been fixed as of 2.3.

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