New Theme: Duster
I am rather pleased to announce the birth of a new Automattic theme designed and developed by the Theme Team. It goes by the name of Duster and is quite an interesting theme — if I may say so myself.
Apart from the custom possibilities you’re already acquainted with in most of our themes — features like custom backgrounds, headers, and menus — Duster is also equipped with a unique Showcase Page Template that can propel your site up to a new level.
Showing how Duster looks.
With the help of the Showcase Template you can make your front page display an introductory text message, a featured post with an image —big or small, your call— at the top, a recent post column showing the latest post and a list of other recent posts below, and a sidebar with a custom widget that displays your Aside or Link posts.
It also has several details hidden all around, like a responsive and fluid design to accommodate smaller views. We hope you like it and create beautiful sites with its help. We like it so much we’re using it for our team blog, ThemeShaper. 🙂 Go exploring and read more about it at the Theme Showcase (you now can even activate the theme from there)!
- February 15, 2011
- Themes
WordPress.com News 
This looks great! I’ll have to think hard about whether or not I want to switch. I’d love to see more clean and professional layouts like this and Freshy. There are some great WordPress layouts that are simple, but they tend to have huge headers/header images and blank white layouts. I’m pretty attached to the cool/subtle grays with a hint of color and smooth design in Freshy (no huge header or huge header image), but the drawback is no drop-down menus, less flexibility with widgets, and too narrow a body space. Can’t wait to see what you come up with next!
LikeLike
Freshy does support drop-down menus so long as you are using Custom Menus.
See: http://freshydemo.wordpress.com/
LikeLike
Nice theme 😀
LikeLike
Wow that looks nice 🙂
I tried it but I’m confused on how to use it now, but I’ll try it out one day.
Thanks for the new theme ~
LikeLike
Great work on making this theme! I love the simplicity of it.
LikeLike
Switched to this theme last night and I love it!
LikeLike
Thanks for the info! I swear I tried everything to get it working when I first started up… but then again I was completely new to WordPress at the time. 😉 Still, I like Duster a lot and may use it for another option if I ever want something more flexible. It’d be great to see something of an in-between of the two, with cooler moderate colors and come compact designs. Keep up the great work and thanks again!
LikeLike
I really like the wide column for reading single posts.
Being dense here: How do you use the “Links” style post? I saw explanations for “asides” and “gallery”, but not for that.
LikeLike
Now THAT’S a revelation–Drop down menu? We’ll take a closer look at that now.
LikeLike
Great theme, will be amongst the most popular soon I guess.
LikeLike
Excellent! Good work.
LikeLike
This theme seems very nice for those of us who know nothing about editing details and are just trying to begin with blogging… Just to write a text in the proper place, with the proper form, is a pretty hard task!… Thanks, Matías, from here, Mdeo. Uruguay. Gracias, che…
LikeLike
When I saw “New Theme Duster”, I thought about Dacia Duster by Renault :))
LikeLike
Very nice!
Thanks!
LikeLike
Dear Matias
Thanks so much for the beautiful theme! I use it immediately when I found it !
But i would like to ask some questions about how to change some little things on this theme, first please if you have time to check about my blog.
I want to know how to make the white part above the black pannel disappeared from this blog? or other way like, enlarge the size of black header?
And about the botton of “REPLY'”, how could I change the color when mouse passes by, it’s blue on the blog, but i would like change to other color.
Also the sidebar, with all the words on blue, could I change it to Grey something?
I don’t know that if I could change it in a free WordPress blog or I need buy a domain to change it in CSS?
Thanks for read !!
LikeLike
If you check “No” on the “Display Text” option in Appearance -> Header you will be able remove the white space; also, the search bar would drop to the menu and the header image will start from the top.
To change the colors of the theme you will need the Custom CSS Upgrade; you don’t need to buy a domain to customize the look of your site.
LikeLike
Nice 🙂
LikeLike
Ok, I love this theme and would like to use it. I’ve already figured out how I want to design the banner. I’m reading that others are using it, but can’t find a download link for it anywhere. Why is this? Please explain…
LikeLike
Wow! I really like it! Changed too!
LikeLike
I love this theme, and would love to switch to it now, except for that pesky search box in the corner. I only want to use my header, and it’s in a bit of an awkward spot!
LikeLike
Nice theme, but where can I get support for it?
Basically, I am trying to recreate the dropdown menu I had from my previous theme (from the main (horizontal) navigation pane), but the theme appears to ignore that I’ve organized my static pages into subcategories.
LikeLike
Nice theme & with html5 semantics too 🙂
LikeLike
This one is really fantastic. Great job. Thanks.
LikeLike
Very nice!
LikeLike
Wow, so nice.
LikeLike
looks great! 🙂
LikeLike
Looks good. Thanks for the possibility.
LikeLike
That’s awesome! 🙂
LikeLike
Not quite sure how to pull blockquotes and images into the margins. Any suggestions?
Great theme, nonetheless!
LikeLike
Initially, I was happy with changing to this theme. I do, however, have a few questions.
1. How does one place things in the actual sidebar (not the footer)? Nothing appears when I put things there, does this mean that in reality, this is just a one-column theme? Or is the only thing one can add to that sidebar the “Duster Ephemera” (which I’m not entirely sure what means)? I will be using the blog as a static website, and will not be posting much, if at all.
2. How does one create a dropdown menu from the main navigation pane under the header? I just get all my pages placed in a row next to each other, and one of them even UNDER the search box…
2.b). How does one avoid getting page titles placed under the search box? –>have less of them to begin with (or a dropdown)?
Thanks.
LikeLike
1. The sidebar called “Main sidebar” appears on all blog views, while the “Showcase sidebar” appears on the Showcase page and is the one that holds the “Duster Ephemera” widget by default.
2. Sure you can have drop-down menus and limit the amount of items. You will need to use Custom Menus for it.
LikeLike
Whoa looks interesting, maybe i will try it later!
LikeLike
I really like the possibilities this theme has, but I found a small bug: When you hide the Header text, the search box appears on top of the last navigation link on the right side of the theme. Any chance that will be remedied?
LikeLike
Thank you. I’ve switched onto this theme. The world is going open source, your effort is well appreciated. Let the Sharing begin!
LikeLike
I like it, thanks for the info.
LikeLike
I switched over yesterday, love it!
LikeLike
The theme is good and simple but I might stick to my current one for now. This sure will be one of my choices for my next blog.
LikeLike
Really cool, fantastic, I like it!
LikeLike
Great theme. Any way to have a featured post and yet still have more than one post show up in “recent posts” under the featured one? My page will only show one recent post and just list the titles of other posts underneath it.
LikeLike
Looks Neat. How do subscribe to your guy blogs?
LikeLike
It’s so beautiful.
LikeLike
Very cute *-*
LikeLike
Pretty clean, very nice!
LikeLike
Nice work! It looks good to me.
LikeLike
Pretty good!
Keep it up.
LikeLike
Love the new theme but we are just moving to hosting ourselves, can you say roughly when it will be available for download?
LikeLike
Can’t say for sure. It needs to be reviewed and approved.
LikeLike
Ooh, this looks nice! Another to add to my list of possibilities. 🙂
LikeLike
Cool because it is fresh in the eyes and clean.
LikeLike
Wow, nice theme, I wanna try using it next time.
LikeLike
Cool 😀
LikeLike
Yep, it’s a nice theme, all right! Nice and simple. My current theme is like that too. I like Duster!
LikeLike
This is the theme that i am looking for. I really like the Feature post of paragraph ideas. I may going to use this theme.
LikeLike
How do I put a sticky post in the showcase with a small feature picture instead of a large one?
LikeLike
Clean cut. I can dig it!
LikeLike