No Custom Themes on WordPress.com March 8, 2006
Posted by cuyler in WordPress.trackback
Alas.. it didn’t take too long to figure out that it is not possible to create a custom theme using WordPress.com as a host. I am not dead sure why this is not allowed. They must be concerned that allowing this would lead to some sort of abuse (but it’s not clear to me what that would be — probably some security concern).
This is not a limitation when hosting a blog on your own hosted domain. Naturally this is something you would want to do to give your blog a unique look. But for a free website, limited customization is something you have to live with.
Still, it is worth playing with blogs on WordPress.com because even if you host a WordPress blog on your on domain, the administration would be the same. The difference is that you would be able to upload your own plug-ins and themes.
Update»
WordPress.com now provides an upgrade to allow you to customize your blog’s CSS (Cascading Style-Sheet). This effectively allows the blog to be given a unique design and appearance. See their custom CSS FAQ for details.
Yeah I agree, its pretty annoying. Also its annoying that you can’t export or backup your database.
I wonder how Scobol http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ Got his theme, he has a picture of himself..
Whatever
It should be simple enough for WordPress to fix this?
I read that Robert Scoble is a special case. Since he is a popular "blog personality", he has been granted a custom theme.
I have not written a custom WordPress theme, so I can't be sure what it entails. Perhaps uploading themes is a feature that will one day be added. In any case, I think WordPress.com has given us a nice set of themes to choose from.
George, when you click on one of the "Feeds" buttons, you get an XML version of the blog contents. I used this to transfer this WordPress blog to another blog software package. I have not tried it, but I would think you could use this feature to backup a WordPress.com blog.
But things have changed over the last year and a half. First off, WordPress.com provides plenty of themes to choose from. In addition, many of those themes can now display an image of your choice including those that you upload. This gives WordPress.com users a wide range of choices.
But if this is still not enough, WordPress.com now gives you the option of creating your own style sheets. This upgrade requires a small fee, but it should provide almost total control over a WordPress.com site’s appearance.