The development of Opus was started in 2013: I was looking for a (free) theme and all available options I could find are either too complicated or have particular edge case that I couldn't compromise. So I decided to make one on my own: a theme that focuses on content, incredible clean, and worthy to be released on WordPress Theme repository.
Hence Opus was born. Opus is my first theme on WordPress repository.
Opus is made with these goals in mind:
- Opus should look great on mobile screen. Traffic from mobile start to surpass desktop traffic. There's no question on this. Mobile UX deserves priority as much as desktop UX.
- Opus should efortlessly work out of the box Many themes requires you to configure stuff to make it looks like its demo. Once you install and activate Opus, it's already looks the way it looks on the demo page.
- Opus should allow its user to express themselves Everyone is unique. Opus allows you to express your preference by choosing color accents and header image.
- Opus should work effortlessly It really annoys me when the content I published looks misplaced due to technical issue. Opus is developed to detect your content's quirkiness and adjust it on the fly.
- Opus is all about GREAT reading experience. I've blogged since 2008. I've written a lot. I want those posts to be read effortlessly.
Here's how Opus looks like:
Opus is made to be compatible with these plugins:
- CF Post Format Post Format tab UI on editor
- Jetpack's Infinite Scroll Jetpack's module for infinite scrolling functionality
- WP-IG Instagram integration plugin: post your Instagram photo to WordPress
- Civil Footnotes Adding footnote in markdown like interface
Opus has been approved by WordPress Theme Reviewer and it is available on the WordPress Theme repository.
Seven months after its inception to WordPress repository, there are some stuffs that I think need to be added, tweaked, and fixed. Hence the version 1.1:
- Hiding top navigation when the page user scrolls down the page. Display the top navigation when the user scrolls up the page. Saving screen space for more important focus: the content. Inspired by this article
- Adding support for Infinite Scroll feature provided by Jetpack
- Adding support for WP-IG, the Instagram - WordPress integration plugin
- Displaying embed code, oEmbed-supported link, or url to video stored on post meta '_format_video_embed' as video on single page. Note: I recommend Crowd Favorite's wp-post-format plugin for better UX for post format
- Subtle improvement on design: smaller content width to make featured image on post format image more digestable, changing typography from open sans to roboto (IMO it is more sharper especially when it is used on large font-size), adding parallax effect to page image cover, adding subtle shadow to give sense of depth to the layout, inspired by Android Material Design
- Hiding tag box if there's no tag to be displayed
- Fixing top nav behavior on small screen
Version 1.2 is here! This version is basically a visual enhancement and more support for third party plugins:
- Fixing search form bug on 404 template
- Adding better looking sticky post UI
- Prevent entry category crashes with entry time
- Fixing strict standard issue on PHP 5.4
- Turn of parallax effect on touch device because jQuery's .scroll() doesn't play nice with touch
- WP-IG support: adding Instagram icon if the post is Imported Instagram media
- Enhanced UI: adding date, month, and year divider
- Enhanced UI: adjust javascript based effect if the window is resized
- Resizing featured image to optimize page load
- Enhanced UI: changing default page cover photo
- Enhanced UI: fading out page cover as a complement of parallax effect
- Civil Footnotes: Adding custom styling for civil footnotes-generated footnote.
- Changing screenshot image to the better version
- Jetpack support: tweaking styling for comment email subscription checkbox
- Adding custom styling for dashboard header editing
Improvements added:
- Replacing custom time code with WordPress' human_time_diff
- Adding pot file and loading textdomain for translation
- More stuffs for translation
- Better civil footnotes support. It'll still work on infinite scroll scenario now
- Fixing editor styling
- Using protocol relative URL for fonts
- Adding Phillip Arthur Moore's Subtitles plugin support
Improvements added:
- Adding grunt task for creating .zip build
- Adding WordPress 4.1 title-tag support (and its fallback)
- Adding Jetpack site-logo module support
- Adding custom background support
- Adding RTL support
- Adding styling details for Jetpack custom widgets
- Fixing top nav's width issue
- Custom fonts are now pluggable by translation (useful if Roboto & Montserrat has no support on targetted language)
- Changing color scheme mechanism using Simple Color Adjuster class