Rating: 5 stars

There are a trillion wonderful free/freemium themes out there to create websites with the ‘masonry’/’grid’ effect; some are very sophisticated with a gazillion options (as a paying customer of a handful of those themes, trust me, I know… *sigh*).

Writers Blogily — I’ve just tested the free version! — does all that with a minimalistic configuration, and the end result looks as good as those from high-end, expensive themes. Sure, there might be a few things lacking (you get more features using the paid version, of course), but you can get access to most ‘bells and whistles’ by using plugins and/or simply editing a bit of CSS.

For instance, I love ‘sticky’, semi-transparent menus at the top (when well implemented, they create a nice parallax effect). The free version of Writers Blogily does not implement that feature. That’s fine — I just installed the ‘Sticky Menu (or Anything!) on Scroll’ plugin, added a bit of CSS to make the container slightly transparent, and that was all it took. In fact, it took less time to get it working than with some expensive themes I also own!

These days, people expect that themes add way too many things from scratch, such as a full templating engine, and so forth. Writers Blogily has none of that. But if you really wish to add a bit more of complexity, well, you can always install something like ‘CoBlocks’…

Rating: 4 stars

The theme is a nice blogging-theme, and the support is very good and helpfull. Unfortunately the theme is missing one thing that I find is a must when creating a blog – next and previous-links in the buttom of posts! Please add this in a future update!