by Super Admin
Custom CSS
It is our greatest pleasure to give you what you want. Since the very first signup, WordPress.com bloggers have wanted to edit their themes. Today is your day.
With the release of the Sandbox theme, you have a clean slate with some of the best markup ever generated by WordPress. Add to that our new Custom CSS, our first paid upgrade, and you are on your way to creating a blog like no other. You can purchase Custom CSS under the “Upgrades” link in your Dashboard.
The Sandbox theme’s skins can help you get started by providing flexible layout options; it comes with one-, two- and three-column themes with sidebars on either side. Or you can select No Stylesheet and do it all yourself.
For those who need help with their CSS and those who like to help, we have created a forum topic for CSS customization. (Podz is very talented but he can’t be expected to debug your CSS for you.) We expect there will be a growing supply of unique Sandbox stylesheets available in the wild, so be sure to show off in the forums when yours is ready!
Update: You can use Custom CSS to improve on any theme on WordPress.com. Sandbox is the most flexible theme but it’s all right if you want to just change a few things about your existing theme.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:35 am
great job guys!!! way to go for controlled customisation for wordpress users!
August 4th, 2006 at 8:39 am
Wow, thanks
that is really great for our iranian bloggers which mainly write from right to left
August 4th, 2006 at 8:44 am
wow
yahoooooooooooooooooo
August 4th, 2006 at 8:49 am
You guys are the greatest!
August 4th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Amazing. Just amazing. I am in heaven, and running off to do some CSS.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:52 am
wow!, this is awesome, now rly, this is great, can’t wait to try out that new theme with a css stylesheet
August 4th, 2006 at 9:02 am
Woohoo!
August 4th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Excellent! Now I can go break my blog
August 4th, 2006 at 9:33 am
So many gifts today!
August 4th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Wait, do you have to pay in order to activate this ?
“Purchasing the upgrade entitles you to edit CSS on one blog for one year.”
August 4th, 2006 at 9:40 am
Yes it’s a paid upgrade. Our first, actually.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:41 am
Very useful tool, but don’t you think that $15 is a high price ?
Please reconsider the pricing policy.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:50 am
We gave a lot of thought to the pricing, and I think it’s reasonable. (And the response has been really good thus far.) All in all it works out to about $0.04 or 4 cents a day. With less than the change from your pocket you can get an incredibly powerful customization feature and support WordPress.com at the same time. And no one is saying you have to buy the upgrade either, it’s a power user feature.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:36 am
If we buy this upgrade for a year what happens when that expires? Do we just lose the ability to edit our CSS styles, i.e. can we still use the ones that we have configured, or do we have to go back to using one of the other themes?
August 4th, 2006 at 10:38 am
luckhurst, after one year you can either renew or your custom CSS is deactivated until you do.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Best news I’ve ever heard in a long period of time
August 4th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Well,.. but how to purchase this service? I can’t see any relevant link to this.
August 4th, 2006 at 11:16 am
[...] Custom CSS - this is something that I’ve heard many WP.com publishers asking for - the ability to tweak your blog’s design. Before you rush off to change your templates you should know that this is a paid upgrade option. To buy the upgrade you need to add 15 ‘credits’ (credits costs $1 each). Credits can be purchased via Paypal. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Open Source is changing to Paid Source?
I don’t like this feature, well, not the Custom CSS. I don’t think that we have to pay for Custom CSS, you can offer 1 Mbyte free for all users and we can upload in this Mbyte our Custom CSS.
This feature would be the best, but pay for Custom CSS is a horror!
Bye!
August 4th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
15$ is sooo NOT a high price. I mean, come on… it’s for a year! (a Flickr pro account costs 25 bucks, for example.) There’s a blog host here in Germany that charges, like, 4€ a month - and their service and support are really sucky. Well, I’m not planning to get the WP upgrade since I have no idea about webdesign etc., but if then I’m sure it would be a good choice. (And NO, I have nothing to do with WordPress. I’m just a regular blogger here
August 4th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
[...] Now WordPress.com bloggers who use this free service to create a blog can add custom CSS to their site. There is one theme that this can be used with currently, Sandbox…and it doesn’t come free. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Good point… however I think $10 would have been better…. entice more people to come onboard… I guess there is a fine balance between numbers/price… if you don’t want to pay the $15, I guess you can pay in GBP
or just learn CSS/PHP 
August 4th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Very nice.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
[...] WordPress.com started integrating new features. The people behind Automattic start walking a new path : pay for new features. Customized CSS being the first one. Although I certainly think WordPress(.com) is way better than any other free available platform, I don’t think many bloggers will pay a yearly fee to have a custom theme. Enough of platforms already offer this option for free. Surely, upgrade features are the thing to do and how to make money nowadays, but this isn’t the hit yet. It would mean bloggers have to pay twice : yearly fee + designer (in most cases). Personally I would still love to see an import feature for WordPress.com users. Published by Franky 0 minutes ago in whoring. Tags: automattic, custom css, free blog, import, whoring, wordpress, wordpress.com. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Thanks again!
August 4th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
It is great having the option, even it being commercial.
And for the price, the market will tell - I would guess guys from Automatic have done careful thinking about it.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Listen…one more reason that I’m so stuck with Word Press.com
Can’t even think of moving to another Blogging platform.
Thanks a universe to our beloved WordPress.com team. You guys are the best.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
So people who have no credit card etc have to suffer with boring themes?
I long for my own server ^_^
August 4th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
[...] From WordPress.com: With the release of the Sandbox theme, you have a clean slate with some of the best markup ever generated by WordPress. Add to that our new Custom CSS, our first paid upgrade, and you are on your way to creating a blog like no other. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Hmm, I’m really going to consider this. I’ve made a couple CSS pages b4, so I can handle it, only thing I’m concerned about it the header, adding a picture, background and title position . . .
August 4th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
So what will cost us 25 credits? With the current upgrade offer, giving us the option of buying 15 or 30 makes more sense.
August 4th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Thank you! So this is why I just began learning CSS? I knew there had to be a good reason.
Also, the pricing seems most reasonable to me — especially given all else here is free. Thanks again.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
As the first paid upgrade, you might point out where one purchases such upgrades. It took me a few minutes; I was expecting a link from here to an actual store URL.
(To any others who are still looking, it’s in your blog’s admin area under the “Upgrades” tab. Pretty obvious once you know, huh
)
August 4th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Would it be possible to buy credits for no advertising by WordPress on one blog?
August 4th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
societiq, we’ve been considering what else to offer as paid upgrades, I’ll pose that question in another post.
August 4th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Interesting. WP has to pay for itself at some point.
August 4th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Great news for wp.com blogs. With the Sandbox, you’ll be able to style your blog like a wild person.
August 4th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
[...] WordPress’in ücretsiz blog servisi wordpress.com gizli blog oluşturma ve kişiye özel CSS düzenleyebilme özelliklerini duyurdu. Artık wordpress.com kullanıcıları gizlilik söz konusu olduğunda bloglarının arama motorlarınca listelenmelerini engelleyebilmekle sınırlı değiller, isterlerse bloglarını sadece belirli wordpress.com kullanıcılarının erişimine açabilecekler. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
I’m a newbie to CSS, so I’m not sure what is the scope of blog features that this paid upgrade encompasses. If you are clever enough with custom CSS, can you go beyond presentation changes to including widgets, counters, adsense, etc. (as long as they are hosted somewhere else, and visible by URI)?
August 4th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
[...] Working list: Check out the new CSS editor over at WordPress.com Start working on matching up the images over at the webcomic. Import links into the Committee to Protect Bloggers blog. Poll Plugin for here, the webcomic, and daria.be. Input descriptions for Season 2 at the Kim Possible Screen Capture site. (The rest are done.) Adsense to the blog here and daria.be. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
I think you’re getting confused. The Open Source-ness is still there. Plus, the GPL license allows for commerical applications using Open Source code. (That’s the fourth time I’ve said that today.)
August 4th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
[...] WordPress.com users rejoice, the WordPress team has added a new and welcomed feature - custom CSS. Until now, you had to stick with the limited customization that came with the stock themes. By purchasing the custom CSS upgrade in your WordPress.com blog’s admin panel for $15 USD, you have the ability to edit the CSS on your blog for one year. When the year is over you will have to purchase that upgrade again if you wish to make any further changes. I think this is a great way to mature WordPress.com’s business model while letting users rake up on the feature-set. [...]
August 4th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Neok, Open source doesn’t mean “without cost”. I’m not planning to buy credits now, but I think its a smart idea to support WP.
August 5th, 2006 at 12:00 am
WoooWho!
August 5th, 2006 at 2:06 am
[...] Finally, it’s here. The ability to edit the look of your WordPress.com theme to your own liking by editing the CSS of the Sandbox theme directly. The catch? It’s $15 USD a year for it. But like someone said in the forums, people pay more over booze a week, so something like this shouldn’t really be a problem for people that can afford alcohol everyday. [...]
August 5th, 2006 at 6:15 am
WordPress Paid Service
Nic, still remember last few month we are talking wordpress paid service. Let blogger paid a little fees to upgrade thier advanced service such Adsense? Now wordpress.com has been start this service. It’s sound pretty good feedback. For coming month I…
August 5th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
[...] And now that time has come. They’ve just announced that bloggers using the hosted version of WordPress now have the ability to pay $15/year to edit the CSS (visual style) of their blogs. With the unquestionable popularity of blogs and content customization over the last couple years, this feature should really send WordPress to the front of the blog platform pack. Instead of staying content with the default, ho-hum themes, bloggers will now have the ability to completely MySpace-ize their rants and raves until their hearts are content. [...]
August 5th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Pretty cool. I’ll have to look into this.
August 5th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Fantastic - can’t wait to start experimenting!
August 5th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Now there’s a scary thought…
August 5th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
[...] WordPress.com, the popular site for hosting your blog if you want to run WordPress but don’t feel like installing it yourself, has recently announced paid upgrade options in the form of custom CSS, in which you can edit the themes provided to you by the site or even create your own new ones. [...]
August 5th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
[...] Les blogueurs, bien qu’un peu ennuyés, n’hésiteraient pas à lâcher WordPress pour se tourner vers une nouvelle plate-forme gratuite, selon le sacro adage du “c’était gratos avant, y’a pas de raison que ça change”. Ce n’est donc pas possible. Matt et sa bande ont eu une meilleure idée. En plus du service de base (le blog), WordPress.com offre désormais la possibilité de souscrire à des services payants. Ces services ne sont pas obligatoires et ne pas y souscrire n’empêche pas de continuer à bloguer sur la plate-forme. Depuis le début du mois d’aout, ils offrent par exemple la possibilité de personnaliser les thèmes de WordPress grâce à un éditeur style en ligne, pour la modique somme Maryse de 15$ par an. D’autres services sont en gestation. [...]
August 6th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Wow, another great option from the guys at WordPress.
August 6th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
The price for CSS upgrade a bit steep in my opinion. Think about other paid upgrades that will be coming at $10-$15 a piece, that would put users at easily $30-$45 a year if they had to go for like 3 upgrades. Is this a good strategy overall? I think not, the high price is going to push away mass adoption of css upgrade.
So back to basics
$15 * 10000 adopters = $150000 a yr VS
$4.99 * 50000 adopters = $249500
August 7th, 2006 at 2:47 am
Great… I love it
August 7th, 2006 at 8:59 am
[...] 2006/08/07﹕看我最後選用WordPress﹐便知我是支持WordPress的嚕。今天偶然發現原來只要付年費USD15﹐便能加入Custom CSS功能。配襯繁體中文好看的Theme本來就不多﹐能修改CSS真的很吸引呢。付費方法須經Paypal﹐可恨我的Paypal account已荒廢多年﹐近年又沒用信用卡﹐要研究一下了。 [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 9:11 am
[...] WordPress is headquartered in San Francisco, has eight employees and says they just turning profitable through premium services. WordPress [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 9:59 am
[...] WordPress is headquartered in San Francisco, has eight employees and says they just turning profitable through premium services. [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
[...] For one thing, the hosted WordPress service added a few features, one of which is a $15 premier service that lets you edit your CSS. Blogger offers this service for free, but heck, WordPress is still independent and needs to have a way to bring in some dough — and as this is a highly desirable feature, will probably lead to income for the Automattic folks at least a fraction of what Cyworld is pulling in with all their custom digital paraphernalia and trinkets. [...]
August 7th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
[...] 統計的にはそれほど意味があるとはいえないが、Alexa調査のページビューの数やGoogle Trendsにおけるキーワードとしてのトレンドもはっきりと増加傾向を見せている。結論としてWordPressは飛躍的な成長を遂げているといってよい。それも当然だ―なにしろすべてのCrunch NetworkのブログはWordPressのソフトウェアの上で運営されている。われわれは2005年の末に掲載したこの記事一日たりともそれ無しではやっていけないサービス（英文記事）にWordPressを入れている。さらに大事なこととしては、彼らが開発したAkismetというブログ向けスパムフィルターがあり、この数ヶ月で12万件近くのスパムコメントをキャッチしてくれ私をスパムから助けてくれている。 WordPressはサンフランシスコに本拠を置き、8人の社員を雇っている。同社によればプレミアムサービスとAkismetからの収入で会社はちょうど黒地に転じたところ、とのこと。 [...]
August 8th, 2006 at 12:32 am
[...] Niedawno pojawił się w WordPressie ficzer, który mnie autentycznie zmroził. Pojawiła się mianowicie możliwość wyedytowania stylu CSS, pod warunkiem, że się za to zapłaci 15 dolców. Napisałem już swoje zdanie pod postacią komentarze do posta opisującego to novum, jednak z jakichś przyczyn admini uznali za stosowne jego wymoderowanie. Sprawa nie daje mi jednak spokoju, postanowiłem więc napisać coś na ten temat. [...]
August 8th, 2006 at 4:37 am
[...] I’ve started playing around with his ultra-stripped Sandbox theme, which shows great potential for skinning via customised CSS. I’m also fascinated by it’s built-in hAtom support, which seems like it could become a better method for syndicating web content than separate RSS/Atom files. Sandbox is also making waves on WordPress.com as it’s the ideal theme for taking advantage of their new Custom CSS feature. [...]
August 8th, 2006 at 5:02 am
[...] 自己技術不足又不願付錢租用伺服器﹐研究的都是免費的Blog Host﹙自架 vs 免費﹚。至於圖片﹐總是要逐一upload﹐太麻煩。把所有圖片用Firefox的extension Imagebot上載到ImageShack﹐方便多了﹐要是將來發現更好的host想搬家﹐也不用重新上載圖片。免費的Blog Host列不完﹐各有長短﹐準沒〝最〞好的﹐能在當中找到對口味的便行。要是上列的還未合符你的要求﹐便要努力找找了。 2006/08/07﹕看我最後選用WordPress﹐便知我是支持WordPress的嚕。今天偶然發現原來只要付年費USD15﹐便能加入Custom CSS功能。配襯繁體中文好看的Theme本來就不多﹐能修改CSS真的很吸引呢。付費方法須經Paypal﹐可恨我的Paypal account已荒廢多年﹐近年又沒用信用卡﹐要研究一下了。 [...]
August 8th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Thank you! I will use this, I love it!
August 8th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
[...] I guess my perfect theme would be a two column, minimalist theme with an emphasis on the article text. In fact, Scott’s Wallick’s plaintxt theme is pretty close. I guess I always could shell out 15 USD and build it on WordPress using the recently launched custom CSS. Alternatively, I could just pay up and get my own hosted WordPress blog with complete control over everything. [...]
August 9th, 2006 at 3:27 am
[...] WordPress is starting to roll out their paid upgrades. With over 287000 blogs and more being added every day, this was a long time coming. With the testing of upcoming ads and new features being added that will only be available to paying subscribers, are WP blogs become like Blogger from Google? Already only people who pay the fees can customize the cascading style sheets of their blogs. [...]
August 9th, 2006 at 10:37 am
You need a way for someone to “sponsor” someone else’s paid extras (as a gift, etc) like livejournal and others do.
IMHO $15 per year is a tad steep for just css.
Completely customized hosting is just a few dollars a month at some places so consider that.
Here’s a thought: you could allow externally hosted stylesheets for free. There is no security risk with a variable url put into a link rel=”stylesheet” href=
August 10th, 2006 at 12:26 am
[...] Check it out, daily.gigaom.com is now hosted on WordPress.com. If you're logged into WP.com you'll see the admin bar on the site. We're seeing some folks do some interesting things with Custom CSS, like Lorelle and Mirkwood and we've got about a dozen folks testing domain mapping. « SxSW Panel Voting [...]
August 10th, 2006 at 9:56 am
[...] I really love this Hemingway theme for wordpress and i have decided to stick to it for lifetime untill i find a more attractive one. A small concern with free wordpress blogs are that you can’t modify your CSS unless you host your wordpress blog on your own domain/hosting server. Off late, WP addressed this concern by giving free users an upgrade option for 15$. If you can upgrade your blog by paying 15$ thorugh paypal, wordpress will enable CSS editing for you. This is a great news for me and i have already opted for it. [...]
August 10th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
_ck_: Completely customized hosting also requires that you do all your own uploads and upgrades and backups and a slew of other things. WordPress.com does all this for free.
Oh, and stylesheet links are subject to all kinds of malicious scripting tricks. Browser bugs and advanced CSS features force us to filter any CSS that affects wordpress.com.
August 11th, 2006 at 4:48 am
[...] Of course, there’s a drawback: Up until recently, there was no way to customize the look of a WordPress.com blog beyond selecting a theme to use. There’s now a Custom CSS feature, but it’s a paid upgrade… and I’m broke. (Mind you, I don’t have a problem with that feature not being free; I just can’t use it right now.) [...]
August 12th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
The Best Things in Life Are Free …
August 13th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
[...] Since the custom CSS option was introduced on wordpress.com, many people have been saying that this feature is only useful for those who already know how to code their own CSS, or have the time and patience to learn. [...]
August 13th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
This is not an argument against allowing externally hosted stylesheets. You could cache them and run them through a filter before allowing them to be executed, as livejournal does.
August 16th, 2006 at 2:52 am
[...] I had to take that half-assed CSS template down so I could figure it out offline. It was too hideous. Plus I’m slow. Seems I can edit this template’s CSS too, not just sandbox. That should make things a little easier. [...]
August 16th, 2006 at 7:22 am
If you really need to customize your blog that much, you could use blogger.com.
I did use them pretty recently but moved away from them just because they are NOT open source, and the XHTML they use for their search bar on all their blogs, makes your content NOT W3C compliant!
Now that I switched to here, I am pretty happy with the way that WordPress keeps their blogs with some web standards. The pages load faster and it looks more professional. Keep up the good work guys
August 16th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
[...] Give me more colors !!! Cool!. Gone are those days where i had only two colors black and white to switch over between. Yes, i’m talking about colors of hemingway theme. Now that i have upgraded my blog with “Edit CSS” option, i have already started to tweak around the colors. [...]
August 23rd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
[...] It looks like there’s an upgrade you can buy that will let you customize the look and feel of your free WordPress.com blog. It’s $15. Here’s a blurb by Andy about it. But, looking at this page as it stands now, is it worth it to us to spend more time on it? Or can we live with this “theme”? What do you think? Posted by lovelynancy Filed in Uncategorized [...]
September 5th, 2006 at 9:45 am
[...] Of course there was the first paid upgrade, Custom CSS and the Sandbox theme. It was aimed at you more technical folks, since you have to be pretty savvy with CSS to do anything fun with it, but already over 350 blogs have added it. We’ll be rolling out at least one paid upgrade a month based on your feedback. [...]
October 7th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[...] After the comming of Sandbox and the custom css upgrade to WordPress.com, I thought it might be a good idea if all theme authors used the same css classes and ids in their themes. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
I have to say, this sounds neat…but as a person who holds NO CREDIT CARDS, and have no bank accounts…isn’t there another way to pay for this CSS other than a credit card? Maybe money orders or something like that. There are people out here who don’t like credit cards and wish to handle everything with cash.
-Robert-
December 8th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Sorry, it’s pretty tricky online to accept payments without using a credit or debit card.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[...] revenue by allowing users to register their own domain names with the product, aswell as paying to customise their templates CSS file. The great thing about these two services is that more technical able people will have no problem [...]
May 10th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
[...] the coming of Sandbox and the custom css upgrade to WordPress.com, I thought it might be a good idea if all theme authors used the same css [...]
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
[...] guess I always could shell out 15 USD and build it myself on WordPress using the recently launched custom CSS. Alternatively, I could just pay up and get my own hosted WordPress blog with complete control over [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 4:30 am
[...] users rejoice, the WordPress team has added a new and welcomed feature - custom CSS. Until now, you had to stick with the limited customization that came with the stock themes. By [...]