An original, unconventional, made-with-love, photo-friendly theme is just what I needed! So I embarked on an adventure to build it.

Before I considered how to achieve theme-maker fame and glory :) my main goal was to make a theme that I truly love. Along the way, I stretched the limits of current browsers by experimenting with a flexbox layout—which is going to shift the structure of web design soon—and I used image blurs with SVG fallbacks, layered a sampled color under the text to keep it readable, made transforms drip text around the content, and experimented with a CSS-only technique to show/hide comments. I wanted to challenge conventions for color, layout, and comment display.

The perfectionist in me fidgeted with this theme for a long time before releasing it. To break that habit, I decided I needed an incentive. So I applied to speak at WordCamp Buffalo on “Adventures in Theming” and made a deal with myself that I would publish the theme before the talk. I’m happy to say it flew the coup yesterday afternoon and is flying high in the WordPress.org Theme Directory:

Photo Addict is a mouthwatering blend of flexbox with handpicked morsels of color and spiced with random images. Made for the adventurous, it works best if you add lots of images and galleries! All in all, it’s minimal and unconventional.

Install it by going to Appearance > Themes > Install Themes in your WordPress dashboard and searching for “Photo Addict.”

This project represents a ton of firsts for me: first theme released, first plugin released (the Random Images plugin is picked up and used by the theme automagically if present), first GitHub project, first WPTRT theme review (I decided to become a reviewer to get to know the process), and the first time in a long time I’ve been consumed by code.

If I could tell you one thing about this whole experience, it’s that you should make something you ?