Deadline is a simple theme that is designed to be easily hacked into a real theme.

Copy deadline/ into your themes folder and start hacking!

Most wordpress starter/hacking themes try to do too much. They have some something that gets in the way - be that too much out-of-the-box compatibility with 3rd party plugins, a CSS styling framework you may not like, or just something else that makes building a decent site much harder than it should be.

This theme doesn't stick you with any bad technological decisions - because it doesn't make any! All deadline does is:

1. Provide a minimalist CSS reset
2. Provide basic styles for post content based on the CSS reset
3. Render WordPress exclusively using semantic HTML - NO DIVs (grep the codebase, I dare ya!)

Nothing else. You'll find that 80% of the time, all you'll need to do is write some CSS.

Remember: you're not configuring a theme, you're writing one! To serve the purpose of being a theme for hacking, deadline is less than 350 SLOC & 5 source files (with one existing to import two of the others). You have a deadline to make, so you don't have time to learn a theme's peculiarities.

First, try to get the desired result via CSS. Deadline renders HTML to allow for the greatest styling flexibility, so you might only have to change the order of elements to get the desired result.

Beyond that, it's all you. You can make this theme as complicated or keep it as simple as you want.

Happy hacking!