I’ve written a post on how Micro, a free WordPress theme was built in under two hours on the DevriX blog some time ago. Since then we received a few requests/issues that were visible on the theme. Having the theme submitted some ten months ago and waiting for a review for the next eight months or so I forgot about its existence. (don’t we all?)
In any case, having an exact issue to patch, I sat early in the Monday morning and patched it as a warmup for the day. Being a designer, of course, I saw a few other issues and areas of improvement in the process and spent another hour on tweaking the theme, adding a new homepage and preparing the files for WordPress.org’s guidelines.
Version 1.4.0 was submitted and live in a total of one hour and thirty minutes-ish. What does that mean? You can always find two-three hours to build a complete working free WordPress theme and submit for review to the WP repository. Then you will wait some time, but this will be like 0.001% of your time as a whole, so why not?
Some of the benefits of making a free theme:
- You are contributing to WordPress
- You get a shiny badge
- Have fun tweaking something yours, where no one is telling you what to do
- Get exposure, some may even patch your theme if you have a GitHub repository
- Takes very small amount of time
So, grab your favorite editor (mine is Sublime btw), grab your favorite starter theme (I’ve used our DX Starter) and start rocking!