Finally Precious 4.0 is here.

The theme takes the best from Basic2Col and the original WordPreciousss plugin and blend it in to one theme – Feel free to download it, test it, and give some feedback.

Precious is a parent theme, or a theme framework if you like.

This means that the theme is really designed for creating child themes and give you a good staring point in doing so.

My approach to the theme have simply been “Less is More”, or as my husband would say “Keep it simple, stupid!”.

First of all it’s been important to me to work with WordPress, and use the functions that’s already there, instead of making new once. The results is a theme framework with less filter and action hooks, and instead it make the most of the possibility to override or add template files to child themes.

This was also the main philosophy behind WordPreciousss when I started working on this project two years, as I always thought you shouldn’t have Plugin Author skills just to make a nice theme for your blog.

I also decided to have only one widget supported sidebar. And the reason is simply this:

For normal, non-geeky people is rather confusing to have two widget enabled sections in the sidebar, when they actually can’t see it. They see only one sidebar, and assume there’s only one widget section as well.

An other thing that’s important for me when creating a WordPress theme is web accessibility, and the main goal for me is to make Precious as accessible as possible. It is still not “perfect” in that matter, but it will get there in time.

One of the accessibility feature already in is the “access navigation” on top of the theme. This is good for people on screen readers and people browsing your site on mobile phones or not using a mouse to navigate, as it let them bypass a lot of content. (Ref. WCAG 2.0 Guideline 2.4.1)

I’ve also tested the theme in almost “every” browser, included Lynx, and it should work fine for everyone.

What the theme doesn’t got is rtl-support, and I hope that someone who can test this properly can help me with that.

Anyway, I hope people enjoy the theme and give me feedback if there’s something strange going on with it.

My priority now is to make some example child themes to make it easier for people to get started.