Inside

We spent most of last year building the structure of the new home for our theme shop and, of course, we always keep polishing and adding requested functionality to our themes. But during the last months we also put a lot of time away to craft a new theme.

Today we’re very happy to announce we have officially added a new member to our themes’ family. We called it Pepper, and it’s a free modular WordPress theme.

You can download it here now, or keep reading to get the whole story behind it.

The rational behind releasing a free WordPress theme

There are thousands of free themes on the wordpress.org themes repository. So we are clearly not early arrivers to the free theme sphere. Nevertheless, we felt it was the right time to do it, for many reasons.

Contributing to the WordPress community

We’ve been co-organizers of the WordPress meetups group in Buenos Aires for years now. We help develop nurturing spaces for WordPress newcomers and experts and we co-organized the last local WordCamp (with another one on the way, yay!).

That said, we are theme creators. And, while we love growing communities, we feel like we have a tremendous potential of helping WordPress users create beautiful and functional sites with our themes. Why not try to give back in that area too?

Set the case for a modular way of content creation

Our themes work in a different ways than most of the premium themes out there. While you’ll find lots of themes that let you structure page layouts more freely (usually through various implementations of page builder plugins), we think there’s a place for a different way to craft your content.

The modular way our themes are conceived lets you focus on building a rounded web experience without having to invest time on “pixel decisions”. Now, that’s not diminishing of the graphic design in the web. Not at all. We just say “let me handle that for you”.

So we prefer to set useful options so you can control how each module looks and use clear code behind the scenes so that whoever wants to customize beyond that can do it easily too.

What we thrive for: whenever you add a section to a page, it should look nice from the get go. You put the content, we put the design. And then you make it yours.

Looking for new and better options for content creation on WordPress is definitely not exclusive to us. Matt stated on WCUS 16 that this year’s going to bring a new focus to the editor experience. And great work is already being done on that regard for us to be excited about.

WordPress is still a teenager and I’m sure we’ll see new wonders on this area. And even if we know the modular way won’t be the default for everybody, we know for a fact it has already helped a huge community of users launch gorgeous WordPress sites.

Get our work in front of more users

This one is pretty self explanatory, yes. But for a long time we wanted to have something we could gift, for free, that would still add a ton of value to whomever could get it.

Having a free theme to offer new users seemed like a perfect plan for that. 🙂

What will you find inside Pepper

Now that the presentations are over, let me take your coat, and follow me to this other side of things.

Create pages in a modular way

Pepper is a modular theme. As with all our themes, you can build pages with it by combining different kind of modules, where each module offers different content design opportunities.

The goal while designing with modules is to enable you to create powerful layouts without having to touch a line of code. Some key options are available on each module so you can customize its looks and make it part of a whole inside your own branding and visual message.

And you’ll find many hooks all along the theme if you happen to need to get into the code too.

Six available modules

We’ve picked 6 out of the many modules we normally ship with our themes. These 6 modules will let you build amazing stuff with ease:

Blog Module
The blog module lets you insert a blog feed everywhere you want. You have 3 amazing layouts to choose: Classic, Headlines and Masonry.

Canvas Module
This one is a free editor module. You can use it to write normal text, HTML, insert images, shortcodes, etc.

Gallery Module
With the Gallery module you can insert a group of images and show them by choosing from many layouts and numbers of columns: masonry, mosaic or perfect grid. You can even use it with just one image to make a bold visual section.

Slogan Module
A neat headline section to introduce your site to your visitors. With many options to play with and a cool button for calls to action, this one serves as a hero line, a flexible title, a message, you name it.

Columns Module
Lets you group as many modules as you want inside multiple column layouts. So, for instance, you can have a Slogan next to a gallery, or put your preferred shortcode embed on a Canvas next to some neat copy on another Canvas.

Wrapper Module
Lets you group as many modules as you want inside the same big module and place them next to a sidebar.

Keep creating the WordPress way

What if all this functionality was designed in the same way WordPress works today? Well, you got it.

To create a modular page, you just create a page while selecting for it the Modular template. Then from your WP menu you go to Modules » Add New, and select the type of module you want to create, to add it to that page later on.

If you’re used to creating posts on WordPress, then you’ll find that adding sections works quite the same. The UI is simple and clear, and I hope, you’ll feel as if you know where to go inside it.

Useful Theme Options

Yes, we know. Decisions, not options.

But still, we do want to offer you the possibility to modify certain things. So we’ve chosen the ones that we know you can make good use of.

Like typography, for instance (you can pick your own headings and body fonts from Google Fonts right within the theme), or the ability to add your logo image, or some cool header options for color and layout, or picking the main color for your site, and managing the widgetized footer, or the multiple advertisement locations across the theme.

Start from a ready made site

We’re also including 2 ready made sites you can import with a click. You can start your website off one of them, replace the content with your own and have your site rocking in no time. True story.

Did I mention it is free?

So there you go. We hope you enjoy this new theme as much as we do. 🙂

Go ahead and download it right away »