Gridline Lite is a free minimalist theme for WordPress 2.8 and up with full sidebar and bottombar widget support that utilizes a CSS framework to help streamline development and customization. Gridline pulls in the most recent post, with five recently posted stories listed in offset backgrounds below to keep your readers attention.

Installation

1. Unzip the downloaded file
2. Upload the entire “Gridline Lite″ folder to your “/wp-content/themes/” folder
3. Log in into your WordPress control panel
4. Click the Presentation tab
5. Select the “Gridline Lite” screenshot

Configuration

1. GETTING STARTED: To change the number of main entries listed on your homepage, click Options > Reading in your WordPress interface.
2. Photos posted within each entry’s post will should not exceed 590px wide, otherwise, the images will bleed into the sidebar and make you site look icky.
3. YOUR AUTHORS PAGE: Gridline Lite comes packaged with an author archive (authors.php), which will display some author specific info pulled from the Users page in your WordPress installation. In order for the author’s image to show up, you’ll need to place a jpg of the author titled by the author’s last name in the wp-content/themes/gridline/images/authors/ folder. For instance, mine is Allender.jpg, sized at 75px X 75px. Here is an example author page.
4. STYLES.CSS: Unlike most WordPress themes which plug all the css in one file called styles.css, Gridline utilizes the Blueprint CSS framework to help separate positioning, typography, forms and what I’ll refer to as custom or gridline specific styles. To edit all custom gridline specific styles, you’ll need to edit the file style.css in your wp/wp-content/themes/gridline/ directory.