Quickly Showcase Themes With the New WPMU ThemeBrowser Plugin

Everyone knows that ugly themes are a deal breaker when it comes to users selecting a blogging service, especially if you’re paying for that service. If you want to remain competitive in this market, whether you’re funded by advertising or by paid memberships, you must first offer decent themes and then have a way to display them to potential users to seal the deal.

Showcasing available blog themes for a WordPress Multi-Site or WPMU blog has always been somewhat of a pain. Ordinarily, if you want to showcase all your available themes, you need to gather their screenshots or create screenshots after having activated the themes yourself. Then you would need to upload them to a page and find a way to organize them. The ThemeBrowser plugin takes care of all of that for you. Many thanks to developer Chris Taylor for putting this together.

Features of ThemeBrowser:

• Easy to use shortcode implementation on pages or posts
• Displays details of the theme name, description and a large screenshot
• Only displays themes that have been activated by the admin
• Does not display themes without a screenshot
• Compatible with BuddyPress

Quick Review:

One thing that I like about this plugin is that it will automatically begin displaying the new themes you install, so that you don’t have to worry about creating a screenshot, sizing, and uploading the new image to the showcase. The only drawback in this plugin for me is the way the output is styled. The themes are listed one by one vertically down the page with the descriptions to the right, which leaves a a lot of white space on the page. When using this I would probably restyle it to be more like a gallery with two screenshots in a row with descriptions underneath. However, that’s a small price to pay for a plugin that let’s you drop all our themes into a gallery with a simple shortcode. Overall, I would definitely recommend using ThemeBrowser if you want to gain an advantage with users considering your WPMU blogging service. Your available themes will be a critical deciding factor for your user. With all of the blogging service options out there to choose from, showcasing your beautiful themes only makes sense.

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