Frank: A Free WordPress Theme Designed For Speed
Today we are pleased to release Frank, an open-source WordPress theme designed and built to provide a light, responsive and unobtrusive reading experience. The theme’s default home page makes 9 database queries and consists of 2 requests weighing at roughly 30KB (9.5KB gzipped). Frank keeps it basic: no Javascript dependence, no unnecessary images, just a simple, no-frills, fast blog theme. The theme is introduced by its developer, P.J. Onori. —Ed.
Frank is a responsive WordPress theme. It uses a modified version of the Foundation grid system. It also offers the unique feature of a modular home page layout system. The theme comes with various different layouts for your home page (1 column, 2 column, 3 column, 4 column, etc.) that can be mixed and matched. This allows for a home page with different content sections in different layouts.
With intense use of HTML5 and CSS3 Frank cuts down on complexity and improves performance. Frank works decently on Internet Explorer 8+. However, at the moment no guarantees are given for any earlier IE versions. It is packaged with the parent theme (in the frank directory) as well as the child theme (in the somerandomdude directory) which I use for my own site. By using Frank, my home page weighs in at 43.65KB over 6 requests (Google Analytics accounts for ~15.5KB and 3 requests). In addition, 33.78% of global page loads completely within 1 second or less (55.75% in the US). On Google Page Speed, the demo gets an overall PageSpeed Score of 97 (out of 100).
Also, Frank uses a subset of Foundation to provide a responsive layout for desktops, tablets and phones. Add this to the theme’s small footprint and you have a mobile-optimized blog. The theme is 100% open source and developer-friendly. The parent theme (/frank) is released under the GNU Public License and the child theme (/somerandomdude) directory is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Demo and Downloads
You can check the live demo of the theme.
- live demo
- large preview (.png)
- check the theme on Github
- download the theme for free (.zip, 349 Kb)
Why Did I Make Frank?
There are three reasons:
The first reason was to make good on a promise. I made the commitment that everything I created on my site would be open source. That is how Iconic was born, and this is how Frank came to be. My site is now 100% open source.
The second reason is that I believe that speed is an essential part of user experience. I wanted my site to reflect that belief.
The last reason is that WordPress has an unfair reputation of being a slow, resource-hungry blogging platform. Make no mistake, WordPress can be slow, but that is often due to poor use. I wanted to make a WordPress theme to break the unfair stereotype.
Frank shines for sites that need a no-frills blog that focuses on the reading experience. Frank is not for everybody, but it shines when used in its sweet spot.
Future Development
Frank is ready to be used, but there is still a long way to go until it’s in tip-top shape. This theme can and will get faster. Here’s what is currently being worked on.
- Greater typographic and visual polish
- Increased CSS optimization
- HTML cleanups and structural improvements
- Modernization and optimization of Javascript components
- Improved organization and structure of SCSS files
- Developer-friendly build tools
- Guides for optimal use of Frank
Credits
This theme was built with significant help of some great folks. My sincere thanks to Felix Holmgren, Jon Christopher and Josh McDonald for their tremendous contributions.
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oricohen
January 16th, 2013 1:47 pmcool as hell!
might use it for my upcoming blog.
Alex Patin
January 16th, 2013 1:48 pmThis looks fantastic. Can’t wait to do some serious work on here.
Elliott Stocks
January 16th, 2013 1:55 pmNice theme! I’ll be contributing to the theme to fix a couple of bugs ;)
P.J. Onori
January 17th, 2013 5:24 pmThanks so much for the help. It’s greatly appreciated!
Manivasagam
March 9th, 2013 10:07 pmHi thanks for the Awesome Theme , but the sad part is i couldn’t use that, i got error message while uploading it on Wordprss ” Style.css is missing ” , i also tried downloading it from GitHub , getting the same thing ..
Any Help ?
Chad Ridings
March 11th, 2013 1:16 pmHi, I was wondering the same thing. Here is what I did to solve this… I unzipped the Frank_Master.zip – within that zip is the folder named “frank”. Simply compress that “frank” folder into a zip… I named mine “frank.zip” and put it on my desktop. From there I went into my WP admin panel/themes/installed/upload and uploaded my new frank.zip file and all was successful. I checked the “frank” folder that is in the master zip and it has the style.css file. Hope this helps. -Chad
chris
April 14th, 2013 3:35 pmThat’s correct. The wp-uploader is not too flexible when it doesn’t find the style.css on the first level. But you are basically installing 2 themes at once. So you need to unzip them and drop them into the wp-content > themes folder via ftp.
Alex
January 16th, 2013 1:57 pmExcellent!
Thanks P.J.
Kai
January 16th, 2013 2:17 pmNIce work!
Daphne
January 16th, 2013 2:32 pmThat’s one great looking theme!
Luke Williams
January 16th, 2013 2:51 pmHas the theme got an optimisations in for the use of images such a post thumbnails or in-post images? These tend to be a large part of the page size bloating in my experience, even if JS is covered.
AboutaDirk
January 16th, 2013 3:01 pmJust wondering: can we expect anything other than WordPress CMS related posts? I mean, perhaps something about Drupal, some random open source CMSes, or whatever?
I’m not picky btw, just wonder if these are sponsored or not.
Cheers!
Anastasia
January 17th, 2013 2:48 amThey said quite a few times. They just love WP.
That’s it.
And I completely understand that:)
AboutaDirk
January 17th, 2013 2:19 pmYeah, I can’t say I read *all* the comments, nor do I read *all* of the WP stuff.
Was just wondering, ‘s all :)
Cheers for the answer!
Matt Meeks
January 16th, 2013 6:31 pmNice! I love Foundation! Are you just using the grid, or have you included things like Orbit, Reveal and Magellan, too?
Jessi Linh
January 16th, 2013 6:53 pmGood job!!!
Borislav Kiprin
January 16th, 2013 11:05 pmSplendid work! :) Thanks for sharing!
ben_
January 16th, 2013 11:39 pmReally Sweet! Rockenroll!
Shabirgilkar
January 17th, 2013 12:05 amMuch appreciations for this theme and its minmalistic design approach, but I would suggest to pay more attention on readability at places where u keep lots of data, like in work sections. I think the work section is looking bit crowded and less readable. You had given black color to titles of sections and same color are for paragraphs. Rest I found it awesome !
Steffen
January 17th, 2013 12:28 amFast as hell :-) Thanks for the good work!
Jussi
January 17th, 2013 1:42 amVery nice theme indeed :) Excellent readability.
george
January 17th, 2013 5:14 amTheme looked good but just tried to install it locally on the latest wp build and got a The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet error
… am I missing something or does this need to be fixed?
Jacob
January 17th, 2013 7:26 amYou need to decompress the file you get, and then you’ll end up with two folders, Frank, and SomeRandomDude – those are the actual theme files. If you zip them up you can upload them right to your wordpress install.
Yasen Vasilev
January 17th, 2013 7:05 amI like it because:
- it’s clean, simple
- it has large body text!!!!
- it’s free
george
January 17th, 2013 7:53 amhjave you managed to install it???
Toadward
January 17th, 2013 11:09 amlooks nice.
great job!
Samuel Petit
January 17th, 2013 12:51 pmGreat Theme!
I’ll probably use it for my blog once you get the most infuriating bugs fixed.
Anyway, Good Job, and thanks for sharing!
P.J. Onori
January 17th, 2013 5:24 pmHi Samuel, please share your most infuriating bugs with me via email (pj@somerandomdude.com) or on the project’s Github page (https://github.com/somerandomdude/Frank)
Richard
January 17th, 2013 1:16 pmFails to install in WP 3.5, with error message:
“Installing Theme from uploaded file: Frank-master.zip
Unpacking the package…
Installing the theme…
The package could not be installed. The theme is missing the style.css stylesheet.
Theme install failed.”
kristin
January 22nd, 2013 3:30 pmas commented above, the zip that you download contains the ‘frank’ theme and the ‘somerandomdude’ child theme. These need to be uploaded separately and not within the main zip file.
P.J. Onori
January 17th, 2013 5:22 pmHi guys, I’m seeing some people are having some trouble with the installation process. The theme technically consists of two themes – frank (the parent theme) and somerandomdude (the child theme). Therefore, the zip file cannot be used for installation purposes – you’ll need to extract the zip and add each theme to the themes directory of your WordPress install.
I will be breaking each theme into a separate repository and zip file in the days/weeks to come. Thanks for pointing that out!
Ned Nikolic
January 17th, 2013 9:16 pmI don’t know guys – I like it but my favourite is still the Bones theme. Much cleaner code and easier to work with. Plus it’s not really that much bloated than Frank.
http://themble.com/bones/
I would love to hear someones feedback regarding the comparison of the two.
(although I must admit, the first thing I do with Bones is add the Foundation grid because it’s purely just kick ass)
Ferdous
January 17th, 2013 10:14 pmAmazing! I was testing this on my new site and the performance is above this world! simplicity is the new beauty!!
Steve
January 17th, 2013 10:59 pmFantastic and light weight, some small adjustments would help make the page margins optically superior, but the base is great.
Good work!
nikolas
January 17th, 2013 11:15 pmI will be one who dislike this theme? Yes it’s minimal, clean et.c…. But! No animation (jscipt or css) – no “beautifullness”. So it’s 3 or 4 stars imho
Simon
January 18th, 2013 9:22 amI love the simplicity of the theme; it’s really cool. Thank you.
I’m having trouble showing excerpts only, of posts on main page though. Do they have to be set manually on each post or is there an override?
Thanks.
Michael
January 18th, 2013 10:15 amI decided to give this theme a go. The style.css is huge
I noticed that the author has hard coded his google analytics and twitter link in the header too.
gedit is having a really hard time with the css file.
It’s a shame, as I really like the look of the theme.
Tauqeer
January 20th, 2013 5:10 amNice Theme must be popular in next few days :)
Harpreet
January 20th, 2013 9:15 ami installed both the themes, when i activate somerandomdude then it gives me error something like it cant redeclare a function that is already declared in functions.php of frank. the words are not exact but meaning is above
m@rk
January 20th, 2013 9:43 amGreat work, thx for sharing! Are you about to commit it in the wordpress.org theme repository?
Andri Permana
January 20th, 2013 9:39 pmDude, this is awesome! Thanks, a lot.
Mateusz
January 22nd, 2013 1:20 pmLooks awesome ! Thanks a lot !
kristin
January 22nd, 2013 3:32 pmI really like it but am a little confused as to why the header content in the child theme is static? I also seem to have a search bar filling 100% of the width of the screen directly below my main navigation. Is anyone else experiencing this?
gokay
January 26th, 2013 2:11 amsame here
P.J. Onori
February 4th, 2013 9:13 pmThe /somerandomdude theme is an exact clone of what I’m using on my site – as such, it’s tuned specifically for my needs. That said, I felt it was worthwhile to share in order to provide a starting point for people who wanted to build on top of the theme.
You bring up a really good point though – I could have made this much more clear for everyone. I’ll update the docs on the Github repo.
Thanks!
sulman
January 23rd, 2013 2:18 amthanx dude, i really helpful for me
Virgil Lee Shelton
January 25th, 2013 6:09 pmThank you, this is splendid WordPress Theme!
Srish Agrawal
January 27th, 2013 6:44 amGreat! Super Fast! I am sure this will make Google Happy.
Jonathan Laidlow
January 31st, 2013 7:49 amReally love the theme and am testing it on a site at the moment – however I think there’s a bug in the Content Sections on the Home Page sections – while they work very neatly if you set to show three items from a category in a row of three, the “view more” link doesn’t seem to do anything – it cycles through /page/2/ /page/3 etc but each one is the same as the homepage. Setting it to show more than three items just fills up the homepage.
P.J. Onori
February 4th, 2013 9:10 pmHi Jonathan, I’m sorry you’re running into problems. Could you post your issue at https://github.com/somerandomdude/Frank/issues and I’ll look into it ASAP.
Lynn Walford
February 5th, 2013 11:59 amWould your Frank Theme work with Google Adsense ads?
What happens to the ads when the theme turns to the mobile verison?
I’ve spent the extra money for a very fast server, MAXCDN,W3 Total Cache and thousands of dollars on developers. I’ve changed the theme three times after converting from Moveable Type.
Recently there was a hack/vulnerabity in W3 Total Cache that we beleive made load times go up to as high as 20 seconds. Time to first byte was up to 2 seconds. Updating W3 Total Cache solved the problem but it took me a week to figure out.
Now SEO guys are telling me if wirelessandmobilenews.com is not under 3 seconds to download, Google won’t send it traffic.
Wireless and Mobile News can’t survive without ads to pay for the expensive hosting and editor.
Will you be making a commerical verison of the theme? Will it work with most of the recent plugins?
elena rapisardi
February 7th, 2013 4:38 amthe theme is awesome, unfortunately can not be used as menu does not change or site title still remain yours.
it’s a pity!
Vanessa
February 7th, 2013 7:35 amWow — the comments about this theme are ravishing! Gotta try this one out now!
mvc
February 24th, 2013 4:55 pmtanks for share . i want make this theme
cooking cake games
February 25th, 2013 11:26 pmI was also facing same kind of problem and with the help your blog I got the solution. Thanks to share.
Daveed
April 3rd, 2013 6:41 amExcellent theme thank you.
Been playing with it a bit. One question: Can’t seem to get excerpt to work either by choosing in “reading” or by adding a manual excerpt. Gettign full post on home page either way. I tried this with child theme, frank directrly and someotherdude. Any idea?
Thanks
Daveed
April 3rd, 2013 6:51 amre excerpt – nevermind more tag does this
chris
April 14th, 2013 3:48 pmI like the theme a lot. And I would never start a new project on a non-responsive theme again! But I would recommend working from frank itself and not somerandomdude because it’s still faster and cleaner in the backend (and easier to understand). next interesting step will be the implementation of plugins …
Greg
May 12th, 2013 6:14 amLove the theme, exactly what I need. New to WP however, and trying to figure out how to apply ‘Text’ widget in ‘Index Right Aside’ across entire site, rather than only the home page. I’ve tried going through all the options and editing sidebar.php, but still the default ‘About This Site’ and search bar appears in ‘Index Right Aside’ outside of homepage. Any help much appreciated.