Always on the quest to review as many new themes as possible, today was no different when I saw the Freggie release on my Dashboard. WordPress is a great application which has been freely distributed across the globe hundreds of thousands of times now - and the user base keeps growing, as well as corporate adoption of the platform.
This is an interesting theme, shall we say. But I must admit there are several elements of this theme you will probably see showing up on one or another of our network of sites in the near future, because it’s just too cool.
First, let’s hear the story from Rikkye..
Nuwen.Com » Freggie Wordpress Theme!
Freggie took me about 4 hours to design, and 4 hours to code (by hand!). Like always, I started off with a blank page and no plan whatsoever. Somehow, I still ended up with an idea, :lol: . In my opinion, I believe this theme has achieved the zen of CSS elegance. Everything is exact and accurate down to the last pixel. There are less use of images and more use of CSS. Particularly, I’m quite fond of the ‘comment page‘. So you might want to take a look at that.
Post Formats
For anyone who’s doing a chronological entry type of site, this format should appeal to you, especially if you have one or less posts a day. I’ve always appreciated the similar feeling of the “Travelogue” theme (from the first Theme Competition) which has been often appealing to me- the fonts are clean, the look is great, the date block appeals to me so much, I just need the diligence and appropriate situation!
None the less, there are three things that I really look at on any template for WordPress aside from overall design and appeal - the post format is the first and most important, including their incarnation of blockquotes. Someone tell people that little line on the left side vertically isn’t appealing to theme designers? I know there are so many limitations, but there are also so few, and the designer of Freggie wasn’t afraid to think outside the box.
Boxes around blockquotes appeal to me, so this one gets a great thumbs up. From the inset on the left you should be able to clearly see the way the date is inset properly and nicely as in the aforementioned Travelogue. This and the nicely sized font, nearly embedded post data - this post format is definitely a winner.
Unordered Lists - I used the every day, all day. So, I wanna make sure they look nice, and often they just don’t. I love the templates where they hang OVER the left hand edge of the 
page margin. So appealing! Nonetheless, the UL tag produces a lovely little swirly thing - included with the template of course. You can modify this, truth be known, to anything, so if nothing else, use this one as an example of how you can modify your site template to include your favorite little iconic symbol, image or whatever as your UL bullets.
Paging - Often not discussed as few people use it, unless they have extremely long posts, or work for WebLogs, Inc. (but only about 10% of their bloggers can 
write more than three paragraphs anyway), and often they are plain just omitted from themes when they are released. It’s nice enough to have them, but better yet for people to use them properly for site interactivity as well as displayed in a very nice, clean format.
This reverse block format, as shown here, is very nice. I have to admit that their choice of contrasting colors is a bit pale for me, but none the less it works, and looks great. Tastefully integrated into the page bottoms, these page numbers are going to be appearing on some of my sites in the near future!
Summary
Clean and fresh, albeit a bit too narrow for my liking, this not-overly-contrasting theme called Freggie (a green theme, as in green like a frog) has great elements including ‘ul’ spiral icons and an inverted-block paging style that will definitely be in use on my pages soon. Great work from the author, Rikkye Nuwen of Nuwen.com.
