Toivo: A Bold Minimalist WordPress Theme

Toivo Lite is a new theme on WordPress.org that features a bold minimalist design that really shines on mobile. Sami Keijonen created the theme to be suitable for both business and blog sites.

Toivo is Finnish and it means “hope” in English. It’s one of a very small number of WordPress themes listed as accessibility-ready in the official directory. Toivo meets the necessary guidelines without compromising the overall design.

Toivo can be easily personalized via the customizer with the following built-in options:

Set header text color, background color, header image, and background image
Support for 3 navigation menus: primary, top, and social navigation
Select from 3 different layouts: 1 column, 2 Columns: Content / Sidebar, 2 Columns: Sidebar / Content
Edit the front page callout title, text, and URL

With Jetpack active, the theme has additional features for custom content support:

Upload a logo
Show your testimonials
Display portfolio items
Add infinite scroll to your blog

Toivo is Keijonen’s sixth theme accepted to WordPress.org. In the past he has often built on top of the Hybrid Core framework, but this theme uses only select parts, including the Hybrid Media Grabber (a script for grabbing media related to a post), a stripped down version of Schema.org markup support, and the Breadcrumb Trail.

“I can still use best parts of Hybrid Core and make decisions based on theme I’m building,” Keijonen said. “Toivo is slimmer with fewer translating strings, and has less code to handle.”

Keijonen said that branching out has helped him to understand every line of code and have more control over the theme.

“Don’t get me wrong, I have learned most of my WordPress theme knowledge from Justin Tadlock,” he said. “Theme Hybrid is still the only community I feel I belong. It is the place where you can learn, be yourself, ask help, have opinions, and get feedback. But in a way I have grown out of it; it’s like a moving-from-home experience.”

Toivo was rejected when submitted to WordPress.com, but Keijonen is known for his tenacity and continual experimentation with design and distribution approaches.

“I have plans to fork the theme, create church and charity themes out of it, and sell it on Themeforest if they allow it,” he said.

A year ago, Keijonen conducted an experiment wherein he made his commercial Mina Olen theme available for free on GitHub to see if it would affect its popularity and sales for support. The results were positive overall, and Keijonen now has more commercial products available on GitHub. To date, he has earned $5,304 from the WordPress.com version of Mina Olen and 2,142€ from sales of the self-hosted version.

Getting Toivo approved on WordPress.org was the next step in his theme development journey and Keijonen reports that the experience was “fast as a shark” this time. Toivo has been downloaded more than 1,100 times in less than a week. Check out the live demo to see the theme in action. You can download it for free from WordPress.org or get additional features and support with the commercial version.

Source: WP Tavern