Cogitate is a Twenty Twelve child theme that I built for evansolomon.me. I wanted to make a theme that:

• Has ridiculously readable text
• Is as minimalist as possible without sacrificing fanciness
• Supports a blog and an independent-but-consistently-styled front page

To me, those are the most important elements of a theme. Cogitate is what I came up with.

Cogitate is not especially flexible, because I wrote it entirely for my own use. Cogitate assumes you have two menus you want to show on your front page. One of them ("Front page profiles") will be titled "I am" and the other ("Front page projects") will be titled "I make". This is hard-coded into the theme, so that's that. Cogitate also assumes you want site titles to link to your blog, not to the front page. This one happens to be changeable with the cogitate_header_link filter. Finally, Cogitate assumes you're using Typekit and have these fonts:

• Proxima Nova (thin and bold)
• Quatro Slab (regular and italic)
• JAF Domus Titling Web (light)

Cogitate will fall back to Open Sans in the case that these fonts are not installed, but I have no idea what it will look like.

Since it's a child theme of it, Cogitate requires the Twenty Twelve theme. I don't think there are any WordPress dependencies that aren't already enforced by Twenty Twelve.

Cogitate requires PHP 5.4 because I am using a some features added in 5.4. Right now that includes the new short array syntax ($array = [ 1, 2, 3 ];) and short echo syntax (<?= "Print this"; ?>). Cogitate also uses some features added in 5.3 (closures), but that requirement is largely irrelevant thanks to requiring 5.4 anyway.

WordPress only requires PHP 5.2.4 right now, so it's entirely possible for WordPress to work fine on your server and for Cogitate to break it.

Proceed with caution.