Releasing a free WP template is something I’ve been talking about for six months, and I’m excited to finally set my Thrilling Heroics design loose as a free, open-source theme to help you build your own awesome blog! This is my personal SEO- and social media-optimized design (that I used to use right here on ThrillingHeroics.com) which I’ve experimented with, tweaked, and perfected for a year and a half!

You can also see custom installations I’ve built at Business Backpacker and In Search of Sanuk. And of course, check out the live demo site here.

I’m proud to make this available publicly as free software licensed under the GNU GPL 3.0 license. That means you’re free to use it anyway you like for your commercial or personal blog, modify, alter, improve upon and share.

Just Give It To Me Already!

See Live Demo
Download and see the full details & installation instructions here

ThrillingTheme is largely based on FreshNews 1.0 from WooThemes and WP Framework, to which I added my own design elements, incorporated support for several prominent plugins, and added tremendous amounts of custom code to help you customize your blog and easily integrate it with your social media presence. I spoke to Adii from WooThemes yesterday to get his blessing (I have built designs on top of their awesome premium themes for many of my sites and highly recommend the whole WooThemes portfolio), and I owe thanks to Magnus Jepson, Jai Nischal Verma, and Vladimir Prevolac for a lot of design and code inspiration.

Fully-Customizable

The powerful admin options page allows you to make changes without editing code: you can upload your own custom logo image; automatically resize, crop & frame your own photo snapshot in the header, use mine, or leave it blank; change color schemes; easily integrate your Twitter, Flickr & Facebook profiles; add your Google Analytics tracking code, and manage your ad slots. Everything is plug-and-play!

Social Media Integration

I know how valuable a fully-integrated web presence can be when you’re building your personal brand and connecting with new people online. ThrillingTheme makes it easy to integrate your latest Twitter updates, recent Flickr photos, and even insert a link to your Facebook group or fan page with beautiful, pre-designed widgets.

Increasing Your Readership

I’ve also optimized ThrillingTheme (painstakingly over 3 years of experimentation) to keep visitors on your website longer and increase your subscribers. You’ll notice an attractive RSS & email subscription box in the sidebar, and a tabbed content box (set your own featured category, automatic popular posts, recent comments & tags). Single post pages are specially-designed to encourage visitors to share on social bookmarking sites with quick submission buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon & more, and I’ve built in support for the WordPress Related Posts plugin to encourage readers to dig deeper into your site.

Other theme features:

• 4 Color Schemes – Shades of Grey, Thrilling Orange, Black & White, Icy Blue
• Search Engine Optimized
• Auto-sized featured images & thumbnails
• Integration with FeedBurner email subscriptions
• 125×125 and 300×250 ad management
• Blog category dropdowns
• 3 widget-ready sidebar areas
• Built-in support for WordPress Related Posts
• WP 2.7+ nested comments support (new in ver 1.1)
• Gravatar support in comments
• Compressed CSS & minified JavaScript for faster load time
• Cross-browser compatible with all major browsers
• Tested with WordPress 2.5 and up
• Custom page templates for archives, sitemap & photo galleries
• Easy customization with the integrated theme options page
• Totally FREE for commercial & individual use

See Live Demo

See full theme details & installation instructions here

Get it free ($25 value) for commercial & personal use by sharing:

Please help support the continued development & improvement of this theme.

Thanks so much for your continued support and encouragement!

Click here for further Installation Instructions, Help Topics, License Info & Changelog

For more on how to install and how to use the special functions of this theme, please see the full download page.

I cannot provide free support for this theme, but if you have bug reports, please leave your comments below and I will do my best to keep it updated and fix any major errors that you guys report here. If you urgently need help customizing ThrillingTheme for your site, I am for hire.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Steal My Blog Design! Announcing the Free ThrillingTheme for WordPress