There have been some amazing WordPress themes over the last few years. Unfortunately, some of these great themes have not been updated in years, therefore they are not compatible with the latest versions of WordPress (particularly themes released before WP 2.7).

Although trends change, some of these iconic themes have stood the test of time well. Which is why I was pleased to read that a few designers are keen on bringing classic themes back to life.

WordPress designer Leland Fiegel, who did a fantastic custom theme for me 5 months ago, outlined his plans on this in his article ‘Resurrected Themes – Bringing Old WordPress Themes Back to Life‘.

And Leland his not the only one who is keen on doing this. He notes that he got the idea himself from WordPress designers Remkus de Vries and Ian Stewart was keen on the idea too. Leland’s plan is to choose an old GPL licensed theme and then an up to date framework like Thematic. He will then convert the older theme to work as a child theme of the framework.

I would expect the process of upgrading a theme would be much quicker than creating a theme from scratch. And with many sites releasing themes to the WordPress community in order to get a little traffic back, it’s surprising that older themes aren’t upgraded more regularly.

Tung Do, the WordPress designer better known as Small Potato, commented:

I’m +1 for theme resurrection. Plugins get abandoned and re-supported all the times. It’s about time someone does it for themes.

Leland already has, though it would be great to see more designers join the ‘resurrection party’ and release some classic GPL themes.

What do you think about all of this? Is there a classic WordPress theme you’d like to see upgraded to WordPress 3.0?

Thanks,
Kevin