Theme:

Bold Headline

Description:

Minimal, single column, responsive theme based on _s by Automattic, Bold Headline has three widget areas which will appear in your footer area.

Supports:

  • Widget
  • Menu
  • Header
  • Customizer
  • Featured Images
  • Post Formats
  • Editor style

The good

Bold Headline is a very good theme. I first ran across this theme when I was looking through a queue of themes that hadn’t had their first round of reviews. Yes. I do it from time to time. One of the things that attracted me to this theme was the word ‘minimal’ in the description. I love design and love minimalistic design just as much. So, of course, I had to check it out.

This theme is loosely based on a 960 pixel grid system with the real content being 581 pixels wide when viewed on a desktop monitor. That makes for really good readability with the chosen font family — Lato — for the body. What I truly love about this theme is that it doesn’t follow the norm of having the content of the article, or post, on the left hand side. It switched things up a little by moving it to the right-hand side.

Now, I mentioned it has support for editor styling. That is a great thing because it gives the user a slight preview of what the post will look like before they hit the publish button. I mean who doesn’t like a preview of a final result without having to press a button?

With aesthetics aside let’s talk about the thing that makes this theme really work. The code.

The code

As the description states it is based on Underscores. There are twenty PHP files that make up this minimalistic theme, six JavaScript and four CSS files. There are of course a few others but those are font, image and language related files.

What makes this theme really good is the fact you can actually expand it with a child theme. Yes. I’m a huge fan of downloading and creating a child theme to test.

Headlines has post format support from the get go so in your child theme you can easily add files and expand. You may, however, how to specify which ones you want to add just in case.

The bad

Yes, there are a few things I feel are not good. This list is fairly small. It comes down to only one thing. JavaScript. I’ve never been a huge fan JavaScript solutions. The theme uses it to adjust the size of some of the elements but does it in a nice way.

Conclusion

Bold Headline is a great theme. I feel it has a lot of potential to be used in a magazine style site. It’s a great starting point.