WP Paintbrush: A New WordPress Theme Creator and Front End Editor

WP Paintbrush is a WordPress Theme Creator and Front End Editor built by Ryan Hellyer and Dan Milward of WP eCommerce Fame. The public beta launched today it is definitely worth taking a look. I’ve been playing around with it all morning and it really is easy to use and fun. In the past I’ve found drag and drop theme frameworks to a bit of a drag (haha) but this one is much more intuitive and easy to use. There’s less of the drag and drop and more of the buttons, sliders, and settings.

WP Paintbrush is installed like any other theme. Activate it and then go to the front of your site. You’ll see the WordPress Coraline Theme is the default and an editing panel appears which lets you change the settings:

I think Coraline is a good choice for the default as it’s got a standard, clean layout which is a great starting point for your own design.

The settings are extensive, from simply changing fonts to using the layout editor to change the layout:

At the minute, WP Paintbrush is in public beta so I would not recommend using it on a production site, but it’s fun to have a play around with. And if you are doing so be sure to report any bugs!

Features

• Drag and drop movement of theme sections.
• Fixed or flexible width layout with min/max width
• 0 – 2 sidebars
• Cross-browser compatible (including IE6)
• import/export designs
• Color and image pickers
• Font selectors
• More to come!

What do you think? Will WP Paintbrush change your WordPress life?