Go ahead and admit it, sometimes WordPress.com has some pretty cool themes.
A while back, before the days of Standard Theme, I really liked a few themes available on WordPress.com but they didn’t appear to be downloadable. I searched high and low for what seemed like an eternity, but it seemed that only the ‘elite’ wordpress.com bloggers had the rights and ability to use these magical themes.
I had almost given up, but then I found it: Automattic’s SVN.
It’s here: http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/
You can look through it in your browser, but to do much else you need to use Subversion.
It contains every theme on WordPress.com, and you can download all of them.
As I mentioned, this is easiest to do with subversion.
Most Linux distributions don’t come with Subversion installed, but that’s easy to fix:
If you’re running a distro that uses apt, use
apt-get install subversion
or if your distro uses yum
yum install subversion
Done.
Now you’re ready to download.
Pick a theme, any theme.
For this example, I like the new Pilcrow theme. It’s pretty cool and surprisingly flexible for a non-premium theme.
To download Pilcrow I just enter this:
svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/pilcrow/
Subversion then copies that folder to your server and its ready to go.
You can replace pilcrow with the name of any other theme and subversion will do the same thing.
…and just like that, you’ve got access to some awesome themes.
Enjoy!
