Theme Updates for Custom Menus and More
Last year we—the Theme Team—were quite busy, not only offering you 29 great new themes, but also improving the themes you already love and use on your WordPress.com sites. In case you haven’t looked closely at your theme in a while we’d like to point out several recent improvements.
Custom Menus
61 of our themes now support Custom Menus—we’ve enabled it for all themes that previously supported top-level navigation with pages.
For themes without top-level navigation support you can still create Custom Menus and add them as widgets to your sidebar. Read the Custom Menus support page to learn how to get the most out of this feature.
And More…
In addition to Custom Menus we also enabled Custom Background support for 72 themes, added Post Formats support to a few themes, and updated all themes to use the standard WordPress comment form. The comment form changes—though invisible to you—pave the way for cool new social features involving comments on WordPress.com sites.
Many themes also received small updates. For example, two options were added to one of the most popular themes on WordPress.com, MistyLook: single post navigation links and hide the search bar from the header (both are available via Appearance → Theme Options if you use MistyLook).
Help Us Improve
Several of you recently said that your theme is almost perfect and we are curious about the last missing piece. Help us improve themes on WordPress.com by answering our question over on the Themes forum: If you could change one thing about your theme, what would it be?
This year we will continue making improvements and launching more new themes—all to ensure you have a theme that fits you perfectly and that you are excited to show off.
January 6th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
To freshen up my blog, I am trying to decide which theme to change to. Good to here that some of the older themes have the options I have become used to with my current theme.
January 6th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
The theme team is most definitely a dream theme team! Great work!
January 6th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
I have just changed the theme for my blog a while ago, and this a great way to give my blog a new twist. Thanks Theme Team!
January 6th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Thanks for the updates. I always look at the updates and see what will be best – I am constantly updating the look of my blog to give it the look and feel I want – mostly I rely on new styles of graphics etc but these changes I will look for within the template I use.
January 6th, 2011 at 2:45 pm
I will have to experiment with this custom menu, didn’t realize it was there, thank you for that.
January 6th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
“Theme Team” is quite a tongue twister
Anyway, thanks for this, WP!
January 6th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
This is great. You’re doing a great job. Thanks!
January 6th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Thanks for updating us. Debating on keeping my theme, or freshening it up with something brighter!
January 6th, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Thanks for the information.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
There is little one can say except you guys are doing a fantastic job!
Just keep going. And oh, one more thing: more snazzy looking mag themes would be awesome!
January 6th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
WordPress Theme team has DEFINITELY done a great JOB in 2010. Thanks for making my blog look better with LOVELY THEME.
This is fantastic! Thanks theme team. Cheers.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for updating continuously.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Thank you for this – very helpful – keep on trucking!
January 6th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Thanks for the great tools!
January 6th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Thanks for the new features and updates!
January 6th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Thank you for all your hard work! Things are looking better all the time.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
I love how you keep giving us new and improved options for our blogs. Thanks WordPress.com! X
January 6th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Excellent. Thanks for that.
January 6th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Can’t wait for more great stuff from WordPress Theme team.
January 6th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
As I browse more WordPress blogs, I notice many bloggers feel WordPress has the most coolest themes compared to other providers.
January 6th, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Cool! Thanks WordPress.
January 6th, 2011 at 5:08 pm
For the moment I do not intend to change the theme of my blog, but it’s nice to know that everything is in motion.
Thanks!
January 6th, 2011 at 5:39 pm
It is true! My theme is almost perfect!
January 6th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Thanks! Very helpful!
January 6th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Oh wow this is really nice. Thanks!
January 6th, 2011 at 7:31 pm
I feel a-tinkering coming on.
January 6th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
I really love that the teams there at WP are on a quest to continually upgrade the features and functionality. Totally appreciated!!
January 6th, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Lance,
It really helps to have this update about general theme improvements. I see Inuit Types now has the custom menu options. Great! My theme is quite perfect because I have the CSS upgrade.
January 6th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Thanks for the updates keeps me wanting to mess around with my blog
January 6th, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Thanks! This was very helpful. I created a custom menu in a few minutes after reading this!
January 6th, 2011 at 9:28 pm
I’ll have to check my “theme” out and see how the custom menu would work—thanks!
January 6th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
Wow this is just awesome! I’ve been trying to find a theme that suits just perfect for my health & longevity blog, thanks!
January 6th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
Terrific, this will almost certainly help with long-time theme users.
January 6th, 2011 at 11:46 pm
Great–always good to know that things are going upwards and onwards.
January 6th, 2011 at 11:55 pm
I noticed the other day that my theme, Coraline, has a “aside”, “gallery” or “standard” post format. I LOVE it!!! Thanks!!
January 7th, 2011 at 12:00 am
I change my theme often, and it’s because I simply cannot decide which I one I love the most, they’re all great!
You guys in the theme team have done a really good job. Keep the new themes flowing, will you? Many thanks
January 7th, 2011 at 12:03 am
No question about: it Theme Team at WordPress is the BEST!
January 7th, 2011 at 3:28 am
Perfect for consideration for 2011…
January 7th, 2011 at 4:05 am
The move from Windows Live Spaces was filled with trepidation, but as it turns out, I couldn’t be happier with WordPress. Spaces was nice for the fonts, font size & font color, but overall I really like the clean professional look.
January 7th, 2011 at 5:16 am
Great work WordPress!
January 7th, 2011 at 10:28 am
Keep up the amazing job WP!
January 7th, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Once again, thank you WordPress, a new a lot of WordPress.
January 7th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Thanks to the WordPress theme team. Indeed they’re doing more than what we need. In fact, I needed some information on the Theme Updates for Custom Menus. And I got it. Thanks again.
January 7th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
I’d like to see more themes, please.
January 7th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
This is something really good to mull over…. What a good way to organize things!…. Now I’ll have to think about what readers will find most useful and helpful…. Thank you very much!…. It’s good to know you’re always coming up with ideas to improve WordPress.
January 7th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Fantastic. WordPress, you are making us more comfortable. Thanks.
January 8th, 2011 at 3:03 am
Thank you for your hard work
January 8th, 2011 at 5:55 am
Thanks for the updates.
January 8th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
This is nice… thanks for the update.
January 8th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
This is going to be SO useful! Thanks, theme team!
January 8th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
Thumbs up for WordPress!
January 8th, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Superb! I really appreciate the theme team’s wonderful work. And I look forward to more themes, and more flexibility in positioning the blog title, in the height of the header picture, etc, in the number and width of columns, etc. Cheers! Keep the good work up!
January 8th, 2011 at 11:39 pm
Great job. Thanks guys. You are the best theme team ever
January 9th, 2011 at 10:13 am
Love the themes make things easier on the eye for readers…very nice, thanks.
January 9th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
I feel at home with WordPress. Lots of new tools and theme for all.
January 9th, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Excellent. Custom Menus is a great feature which expands the number of use-cases that WordPress can support.
January 10th, 2011 at 2:55 am
Thanks for the useful info!
January 10th, 2011 at 6:08 am
Awesome, thanks for the info.
January 10th, 2011 at 9:56 am
Very well done! Thank you for all your precious help!
January 10th, 2011 at 10:28 am
Keep on updating us! You are doing a great job WordPress.
January 10th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
On all themes, stop forcing all-uppercase or all-lowercase for blog titles, page titles, post titles, etc. If I wanted all uppercase or all lowercase, I’d type it that way myself…
January 10th, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Great improvement, thanks for make wordpress more better by day.
January 10th, 2011 at 4:22 pm
That’s awesome – thank you !
January 10th, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Thanks a lot for the beautiful work you have been doing. I guess there’s need to change my blog theme this time around for a change (winks). Cheers to all!
January 10th, 2011 at 5:52 pm
I love my theme with one exception. I would like to be able to personally program the right hand column. Is there a way I can do this without changing themes. I’m not a geek, by the way, which is why I have so loved wordpress for my blog. Pat Bean
January 10th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Nice, works perfect and just what I was looking for, and didn’t even know it.
Keep up the excellent work.
January 10th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Upgrades are great – more flexibility using the current themes – how many more new themes are needed, anyway? Kudos.
January 10th, 2011 at 8:21 pm
You people don´t sleep
! Thanks for looking after our blogs, it´s really appreciated. Keep it coming.
January 10th, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Fantastic. I spent the last couple of weeks sorting out pages so I could add the new menu. My blog has Misty Look theme and the new menu is working GREAT. Thanks so much for all the hard work you guys do as I couldn’t do the tech stuff myself. Happy New Year, Billie.
January 10th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Thanks for all the creativity, I’m brand new at the blog game, but love the options you offer.
January 11th, 2011 at 8:56 am
GREAT WORK. Should be good for my photography.
January 12th, 2011 at 6:07 am
Thanks for asking, and for rapidly implementing my request (next/prev post links for Simpla).
Now a sort of meta-request for the theme team: would you post here a summary of the “one thing” requests? For example, how many of them were font related, how many header related, how many requested more than one thing… I for one would be very interested.
Thanks again.
January 17th, 2011 at 5:28 am
Hi Andrew—We won’t be posting a summary here, but you can skim through the replies (13 pages as of today!) to get an idea of what the common requests are.
January 12th, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Thanks for theme updates for Custom Menus and more. It’s awesome.
January 12th, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Very nice update, I hope the WP team will continue to rock like this.
January 13th, 2011 at 4:10 am
Very neat features! Thanks.
January 13th, 2011 at 7:00 am
Great, WordPress.com is the best free weblogging service.
January 13th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
The themes are super! I like a lot of them, but I’m always happy to see new ones. Three column themes have my interest at the moment. Happy New Year!
January 14th, 2011 at 2:30 am
Thanks for the themes, it really helps speed up the process of setting up a blog.
January 14th, 2011 at 11:20 am
I am using the Enterprise theme and I am very pleased with it.
January 14th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Thanks for updating continuously.
January 14th, 2011 at 4:51 pm
Thanks to the WordPress team for their regular improvements like custom menus, contact form, etc. It’s good to work on WordPress.
January 15th, 2011 at 12:46 am
Yes! More updates!
January 15th, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Another impressive addition by the WordPress team. You guys are fantastic!
January 16th, 2011 at 1:18 am
I LOVE by theme and my blog now that I’ve learned basic CSS…thanks WP! I know I don’t say it often enough!
January 16th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Nice work, you all are doing to keep WordPress the best it can be. Keep it up, mates.
January 17th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Thank you so much for the update! I’ve been hoping for something like this so I can have my videos fed into a separate page on the menu. You guys are great!
January 18th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Thank you for keeping us up to date. More power WordPress.