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Dave Thackeray is a writer driven by creativity… and results. Dave writes in his own voice, clearly and distinctly. He’s on a lifelong quest to discover the remarkable in people and products – but would settle for a machine that washed dishes AND clothes.

Atahualpa – premium theme, freemium price

-by Dave Thackeray

I’ve spent the past few weeks observing with great interest the raging debate over the merit of premium themes for WordPress. I think it was Justin Tadlock who ignited the urns of oil tipped over the growing band of cats creaming spoils from the WordPress mothership.

I admire Justin for his commitment in part to the freemium concept eulogised by Chris Anderson in his book ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’. I admire Tadlock because he gives of himself to those who subscribe either to his words or by beer tokens to his members’ guild. I also melt in the shadow of his words because I’m the biggest bargain hunter I know, and Justin gives you the burger with as much relish as you can eat when it comes to some of the most useful WordPress plugins on the planet, each carrying zero cost.

His Hybrid construction of the framework genre also presides aloft the podium when it comes to machinations of a lightweight but infinitely customisable and developable nature for established couturiers of WordPress, or even those who simply wish to cut their teeth on action hooks.

But there’s a third tier (and I don’t want to appear presumptious here) of intermediate WordPress users who want something somewhere between the framework and the premium theme.

Somewhere in the universe beyond the complimentary but tricksy frameworks, yet with a degree of automated customisation that omits need to become an emeritus professor in the dark art of PHP.

You could go down the Thesis route, but it’s messy money.
You could avail of Woo Themes’ free Bueno look, but it can really only ever look, well, just Bueno.

You want incredible. You want to appear to have magicked your site design from scratch without the inhumanistic endeavour needed to go through the motions.

Enter Atahualpa which, in some corners of the world, has a fan base so devoted that they’d walk over Jesus to get their fix of the next update.

I’ll admit I was sceptical as to the claim that Atahualpa was truly a one-size-fits-all solution for WordPress users. It’s pretty, well, ordinary directly out of the box.

But I pondered this idea for a moment and realised this was actually A Good Thing. Zero interference, let the content speak for themselves. So I was satisfied that, in its immediate, freshly unwrapped and deliciously naked state, Atahualpa would just about cut the cord and make it on to my list of ‘nice themes’.

And then I logged in, switched the theme on. I’d heard some people near-fainted when, moist of mouth and brow, they pulsed the left mouse button over the Atahualpa Theme Options link. But I was sceptic. Stoically disaffected by the hype.

Well, BAM.

To a WordPress aficionado, it was a bit like a gambler handing in slips marked with the Kentucky Derby, NFL, AFL and World Series winners. And finding out he’d also won a date with Cindy Crawford.

Swathes of options. An abundance of choice to dictate every which way your blog should digress. And the coup de grace, an integrated, powerful and near-endless array of SEO options. Right there, gazing out of the page that stretched to infinity with a reassuring train platform-sized reset button in case everything went wonky under my control.

If you have eyes, you’ll understand. If you have both eyes and a mind, you’ll risk losing the latter as you begin to tweak your blog site to an iteration worthy of a monarch. For this is the king of free themes, replete with the kind of descriptive help for each option you’d expect from a teacher sat by your side.

This is WordPress pro, made easy. It’s like coming out of design school five years too early with the certificate and the gawky smile.

Columns, comments, footers, pages, widgets, forms, blockquotes, and of course, complete control over the darn CSS if you feel the need to go native. There’s even a custom field to let you automatically tweet out your blog post.

Of course there’s a ‘but’. No special page templates built-in as standard. But you can figure that out, right?

Hybrid has 12. But it also needs you to find a darkened room for a couple of weeks to master code alchemy and a wig to replace all that torn-out hair.

Atahualpa may well have been the last sovereign emperor of the Inca Empire, fighting in vain to defend Ecuador from his Spanish foes in the 16th century – but he’s inspired a WordPress winner that’ll be remembered by me for at least the next 500 years.

Dave Thackeray writes for love and beer, switching the importance of each indiscriminately. Dave adores making people smile, by documenting his writing career, or with impromptu tickling. Tell him your saucy gossip at davethackeray.com.