Glassical: A Free WordPress Theme
We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, impressive works see the light of day.
Today we are glad to release Glassical — a free professional WordPress-theme created by Abdullah Ibrahim. This theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, clean look and simplicity. Hopefully, you will be able to use it in your projects or at least use it as a foundation for your next projects. The theme is released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
Download the theme for free!
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish. The theme supports the WordPress 2.8 nested comment system and it is also customized for the WP Pagenavi plugin. Also, Cufón is used for embedding the Nevis font into the theme.
- large preview 1 (front page)
- large preview 2 (post page)
- download the theme + PSD source (.zip, 2.1 Mb)
- Blogger version: Demo, Release post (incl. download link)
- release post
Screenshots
Below you’ll find more screenshots of the theme. You can click on an image to see the enlarge version.
“Filed under” and “Comments”-section
“Categories”-section
Design of a <blockquote>
Last but not least…
Thank you, Abdullah! We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.
If you want to release a high-quality free font, a WordPress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set, please contact us — we would like to support you.
You may be interested in the following free WordPress-themes as well:







kristy
November 7th, 2009 1:29 pmThis is why i love you.
Keith Donaldson
November 7th, 2009 1:29 pmAwesome, awesome theme.
Thanks!
Ishan Vyas
November 7th, 2009 1:29 pmCool theme!
chris
November 7th, 2009 1:30 pmit looks just okay…. not very cool
Floris Fiedeldij Dop
November 7th, 2009 1:30 pmLooks great. We’re setting up a quick CMS and this certainly will help with the pretty-enough look of things.
Oscar Martell
November 7th, 2009 1:49 pmThanks for this. Is awesome.
Havana
November 7th, 2009 1:51 pmHoly crap. LOVE it! LOVELOVELOVE it! <3
Webanddesigners
November 7th, 2009 1:57 pmGood theme. Anything free is good.
Design Informer
November 7th, 2009 2:04 pmAwesome theme. Thanks SM!
Scott
November 7th, 2009 2:08 pmI really appreciate that you guys give this things away for free, and this is beautiful as always…
but is there anyway we could get some for Drupal? It seems there is more of a dire need for Drupal themes then WP (even if it’s less popular) because there are less good ones out there…
Thanks SM!
Rochelle Dancel
November 7th, 2009 2:14 pmWow – simple themes really are the best. Thanks for this!
Jahangir
November 7th, 2009 2:14 pmI like the theme but it looks like Twitter-inspired theme. The color scheme and layout looks like a Twitter blog to me.
Prash
November 7th, 2009 2:34 pmLoving it!
cheth
November 7th, 2009 2:35 pmAwesome! I’m going to convert it to blogger template and link it back to you guys. hope you don’t mind. Great stuff..
imran
November 7th, 2009 2:36 pmawesome theme !
cssah
November 7th, 2009 2:41 pmAwesome theme. Loving it!
Gideon
November 7th, 2009 2:41 pmLove it, clean crisp lay-out. An excellent starting point for developers, but also great for people who are just looking for a simple theme.
Anrkist
November 7th, 2009 2:48 pmNot bad… looks like Twitter.
RSS
November 7th, 2009 2:50 pmTurkish version; http://www.rss-ems.com/blog/1513-glassical-08-11-2009
fattdesign
November 8th, 2009 11:58 pmThat website.. the background is copied from tutorial9.net
sid
November 7th, 2009 2:54 pmHi ! Great theme, thx u very much !
Can you help us with Cufon and iso-8859-1 collation ? I can’t display accentued character with the default file of cufon in the theme.
And very thx for u works
Brandon
November 7th, 2009 4:04 pmNice! Super good starting place for a simple clean theme, that’s not just black and white.
Mahdi Al-Farra
November 7th, 2009 4:31 pmGREAT THEME!!!!!
LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!!
BagshiK
November 7th, 2009 4:38 pmAwesome theme, thanks <3 !
Kate Mag
November 7th, 2009 6:28 pmIt’s very simple and nice theme.
Ben
November 7th, 2009 7:06 pm(SM) Thank you, Ben! The file is corrected already! Please download the new version.
This is a nice clean theme, I like it. Though it has a few validation errors out of the gate (9) The good news, it only took 3 fixes to correct them.
1. In the sidebar.php file there is an erroneous closing h3 tag for an opening h2 tag (above “archives”) I think
2. Then also in sidebar.php the ad image does not have an alt attribute.
3. Then in header.php there is also a missing alt attribute for the rss icon in the main nav bar.
Thanks for the theme. :)
Ben
November 7th, 2009 7:07 pmEdit: 1. In the sidebar.php file there is an erroneous closing h3 tag for an opening h2 tag (above “archives”) I think
(SM) The file is corrected already! Please download the new version.
ncus
November 7th, 2009 9:09 pmhot glass :-) I like its simplicity
Vašek
November 7th, 2009 11:10 pmAmazing! Great! I haven’t words… :-D
Jason
November 8th, 2009 12:15 amReally fantastic work, love it!
Abdullah
November 8th, 2009 2:00 amThank you everyone for liking the theme. Its a great pleasure listening people praising your work :).
Martin
November 8th, 2009 3:27 amHow do I deactivate Cufón? It does not work with other characters than english.
Abdullah
November 8th, 2009 3:40 am@Martin,
In the footer.php on lline 18 you will find
Cufon.replace(‘h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6′);
Delete this line and you’re done.
Martin
November 8th, 2009 4:06 amPerfect! Looks great even without Cufón. Thanks for the quick reply.
sid
November 8th, 2009 3:42 am@Martin > Open /glassical/footer.php in your text editor
1. Comment or delete lines 13 (cufon-yui.js) and 14 (nevis_700.font.js)
2. Comment or delete line 18 (call to cufon.replace() function)
That’s it ! You will have default police on title and others special characters you need.
You will note have Nevis font, but it’s the price for the moment to display titles with special characters. I’m waiting help on Cufon to solve this probleme by another way. I have just delete the problem, i’m not solving it ..
You can see results here (i have another probleme with Disqus but i will work on it) :
http://www.taggle.org
Thx SM !
Rob Aid
November 8th, 2009 4:20 amNice article and theme, I gave a remark on themes website.
Abdullah Ibrahim
November 8th, 2009 9:21 amThanks ROB, for pointing the error. I have updated the package, please re-download the theme from http://www.smashingthemes.com/downloads/glassical.zip
and the button will work fine.
bs.kishore
November 8th, 2009 6:31 amIt’s simple & elegant…
gr8pixel
November 8th, 2009 7:13 amnaaaiiiiceeee…
Ndrey
November 8th, 2009 9:45 amSimply amazing.
VIP
November 8th, 2009 9:49 amSIMPLE, CLEAN, USEFUL, COOL…
Thanks guys!!
Mirco
November 8th, 2009 10:31 amHi,
nice work is it UTF-8 compatibel ?
Abdullah Ibrahim
November 8th, 2009 1:07 pmAs told by sid on above comments,
Open /glassical/footer.php in your text editor
1. Comment or delete lines 13 (cufon-yui.js) and 14 (nevis_700.font.js)
2. Comment or delete line 18 (call to cufon.replace() function)
That will make it UTF-8 compatible.
Imran
November 8th, 2009 3:14 pmHi,
Some of my comments are missing. How do I get it back?
For example in this link:
http://testi.iluvislam.com/aduan/
it should have 191 comments but only one comment left.
Hope anyone could help :)
tQ
Abdullah
November 8th, 2009 11:09 pmHi Imran,
Have you enabled the comment paging?
tonehal
November 8th, 2009 3:28 pmnice one! simple could be good!
cheth
November 8th, 2009 4:29 pmconverted it to blogger on chethstudios . net guys :) do check out and download. credits go to smashingmagazine for such a neat theme.
dronix
November 8th, 2009 7:41 pmHey great theme, thank you. However, it looks awful in IE6 & IE7 (didn’t test IE8) as well as in safari. BTW I only viewed the theme from the demo link on those browsers.
Mauro
November 8th, 2009 8:20 pmThanks for this new Freebie Theme, is really awesome!! :D
the real bob dole
November 8th, 2009 10:36 pmI don’t see what the big deal is about the theme. Yes it’s simple and clean. But is it “awesome” or “wow, I’m stunned” ? What makes it so?
Also, the use of the word Elegant is getting slightly overused when talking about design, yes?.
Me shrugs.
Naeem Nur
November 9th, 2009 4:32 amNice Work Abdullah keep it up!
Olli
November 9th, 2009 11:23 pmHi Abdullah,
great Theme. Very good work. But I have a slightly problem. If I try to comment a post I get a blank screen and the comment is not saved. My WordPress-Installation is in the subfolder /wordpress. If I copy the WordPress-Folder and files to the Root-Directory all works fine.
Anybody knows this problem?
Dean Pogni
November 16th, 2009 2:03 pmI had the same problem and was able to fix it. I’m not sure if this is the cleanest way but here goes…
my blog was in a subdirectory, ie mydomain.com/blog. On line 67 of comments.php inside the theme i changed
to
I’m not sure if you can do the same with subdomains but it works for subdirectories.
Mike
November 10th, 2009 1:05 amAm i wrong or is this theme not IE6 compatible?!
THX anyway. Like it a lot!
Abdullah
November 10th, 2009 2:52 amHi Mike,
I think this is time when we should ditch this IE 6. Being a developer, I find it very hard to make a website very hard that is compatible with all IEs.
Only broken websites can make users upgrade to IE 7 or 8..
wrerm
November 10th, 2009 2:18 amthis is a cool template…I liked it so much that I converted it for blogger…http://bit.ly/4tI98
Abdullah Ibrahim
November 10th, 2009 9:28 amI’ve just fixed a few bugs reported by users, please download the latest fixed theme from
http://www.smashingthemes.com/downloads/glassical.zip
Dino
November 10th, 2009 7:38 pmThis theme seems to be lacking the <?php wp_footer(); ?> and the Recent Posts & Recent Comments widgets are aligned to the right. But nice theme by the way.
Abdullah Ibrahim
November 11th, 2009 9:54 amHi Dino,
I’ve fix this and other issues. Download the new version at
http://www.smashingthemes.com/downloads/glassical.zip
Kevin (@thegoldstar)
November 11th, 2009 2:29 pmHi, I loved this theme but I’ve had some problems with it… I installed and activated the theme but when I go to the homepage it looks like:
http://is.gd/4STN2
and in a single post:
http://is.gd/4STP3
I have no plug-ins installed by the way.
Site url: http://thegoldstar.no-ip.org/w2/
Abdullah
November 12th, 2009 11:04 pmSeems like, something went wrong when you were uploading the theme. Try reuploading the theme.
J.G.
November 18th, 2009 9:18 amjust replace short php tags <? with <?php
Nice theme btw.
Murph
December 9th, 2009 10:42 pmThanks a lot, did this in the header and footer.php files and that fixed it. Why use “<?" instead of "<?php" if it can cause this problem?
Murph
December 9th, 2009 10:35 pmI have the same problem, tried re-uploading the theme, still have this error. Wish I knew enough PHP/Wordpress to even diagnose what’s going on. Oh well.
Famba
November 12th, 2009 12:04 pmWow! This is really fantastic! Thank you!!
kzok
November 13th, 2009 12:02 pmnice job “Abdullah Ibrahim” and thanks for the new version ^^
Mauro
November 15th, 2009 9:29 pmSorry but i’ve downloaded your last revision for the theme (from the comments here) and now the tags didn’t appear on my posts U_U
Bitka
November 21st, 2009 9:27 amDear Smashing Magazine,
Have I told you lately how I love you?
Thanks for this one and all the rest :-)
Darker
November 23rd, 2009 11:08 amGreat Theme Abdullah Thanks very much .These theme is better than most premium themes .
Cok tesekkürler Abdullah .Çok guzel bir tema böyle güzel temaların devamını beklerim bu tema cogu premium temalara tas cıkartır .
Mark
November 23rd, 2009 1:52 pmIn IE7 titles of pages and text in blockquote doesn’t look properly.
How can I fix it?
christian
February 10th, 2010 12:23 pm@Mark:
Same problem with the page titles
something is up with H2 in IE — and interestingly, in “compatibility mode” of IE8 the post titles do line up properly.
{sigh}
It’s a CSS issue of some sort causing the IE post title word stacking
I’ll experiement with a fix.
Guillaume
December 6th, 2009 6:59 amHi
I have a big bug with this theme
I upload it many times but i stil have the same problem. It’s like there is no pictures and no css code.
Could you help me plz ? I love this theme !
Robin
December 25th, 2009 5:26 amAwesome. But you really should update the urls not to use “/” but bloginfo(‘url’) since this theme won’t work out of the box with sub directories.
Anders
February 17th, 2010 5:23 amGreat theme! Just one question, what font have you used for the logo?
Canberk
February 19th, 2010 5:08 amCool theme, but ie6 and 7 are messed up :/
wptidbits
March 1st, 2010 5:01 amSeems like this theme got problem to be fix. Anyhow, excellent design. Just need some fixing on back-ends (coding, functionality etc). Do share for any bug fixes. We love free wordpress themes.
DulceataNET
March 10th, 2010 6:57 amVery nice themes, work without problems. Beauty design, excellent!
Thankyou
Federica
March 14th, 2010 1:52 amHi,
nice theme! But it has some problem with both Lightbox and Fancybox plugins (they work perfect with other themes, but not with glassical). How can I fix it?
Thanks!
Max
March 24th, 2010 1:46 pmGreat theme, but quite a few (4 or 5) php short tags (<?) that broke the theme on a server with short tags turned off. Should be fixed..
Luke
April 3rd, 2010 9:53 pmGreat theme, I’m very happy with it, however I too would like to know how to get Lightbox working. I’ve done some digging around with no luck so far.
Guillaume
April 25th, 2010 9:37 amFor those who experienced an IE7 problem, the fix is the following :
Add a big z-index directly in the div, like this :
Should work.
Forearm Tattoos
May 12th, 2010 1:34 pmHi – I have just found your site (recommended in a magazine I was reading earlier) – some really great stuff, and its free too – thank you very much, very much appreciated.
Tzukune
May 24th, 2010 6:09 amI have a problem with this theme! I use a plugin for yahoo/msn smileys (the plugin is here: http://priyadi.net/archives/2005/02/27/wordpress-yahoomsn-messenger-style-smileys-plugin/ ) and it seems that something’s going wrong because when I put a smiley in a line, the smiley enlarge the line and the smiley’s position is higher than line.
View the image to understand what I’m talking about: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4038/4635718410_48d3af00ae_o.jpg
Please help me to repair this thing. I want the smiley in the line.
William E. Kreth
June 7th, 2010 5:33 pmt seems there is more of a dire need for Drupal themes then WP (even if it’s less popular) because there are less good ones out there…http://whocalledme.info/
Thanks SM!
Tomatosok8
June 15th, 2010 10:12 pmHi,
Awesome theme, neat and fresh !
As i use it in French I have a problem with accents that do not show (é, è, à…)
How can i fix this ?
thxs for your help
T.
Elizabeth
June 18th, 2010 8:48 amHello,
I know this is an old post but I really love this theme and it works perfectly for my needs. The problem is, the “Previous Post” button doesn’t work. It just brings up a 404. I think that’s because it points to “(my url)/wordpress/wordpress/?paged=2″ instead of “(my url)/wordpress/?paged=2″ (basically there’s an extra /wordpress).
Can you tell me how to fix this? Thank you!!!
know bay
June 21st, 2010 6:37 pmknow bay
Ipads Tablet
June 21st, 2010 10:32 pmThis theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, clean look and simplicity. Hopefully, you will be able to use it in your projects or at least use it as a foundation for your next projects. The theme is released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
ipad tablet
Umair Kazi
July 22nd, 2010 7:55 pmHi Abdullah!
Please help me out. How do I add the “previous posts” and “next posts” button in each blog post page!
Paul
December 11th, 2010 3:14 pmHi,
Great theme :)
Im using it for a blog but have a problem. The latest posts page shows each full post, i want it to show a little with a read more button like in the preview.
How can i do this?
Thanks
Gasper
February 23rd, 2011 3:38 pmGreat theme!
I was just wondering if there are any plans of updating this one to 3.0 version of wordpress?
Thanks
lynne
March 1st, 2011 10:54 pmhow do i remove the glassical thing at the top? can i replace that with a picture?
Jacky
March 27th, 2012 10:34 pmHey Alex, I just love your theme. I spent weeks in looking for a theme that would paesle me and was almost about to quit when I found yours. Typominima is exactly what I wanted for my blog. I have done minor changes in the code and translated it in Italian. Let me know if you need it.Thanks!F.