The Romangie theme is a WordPress blog theme from December 2013, made by its own author and published in the official WordPress.org directory. It does very little on purpose: one content column, an optional sidebar, a dark red accent (#b12930) on white, and no heavy images. Most of what is interesting about it sits in the code, and so do the reasons for caution today.
What the Romangie theme is
Romangie was built on Bootstrap 3, which was new at the time. The theme's own directory page calls it "a responsive WordPress theme" that is "kept as simple as possible, so your visitors will be focusing on the content". The bundled CSS identifies itself as Bootstrap v3.0.2.
Instead of image sprites, the icons come from two icon fonts shipped in the theme's fonts folder: Bootstrap's Glyphicons Halflings and the Elegant Icon Font. Fonts scale without blurring, which is where the "retina ready" label in the theme's promotion came from: icons stay sharp on high-density screens with no @2x image files to maintain.
A free responsive WordPress theme built on Bootstrap 3
Romangie is a free and GPL-licensed responsive WordPress theme. When WP Tavern covered it on 19 December 2013, it counted the theme among "only a handful" in the directory that supported Bootstrap 3, and noted that it did not look like a typical Bootstrap site. The mobile-first grid that came with Bootstrap 3 does the responsive work: one column on phones, the sidebar beside the content on wider screens. The typography and colors are the author's own.
The feature set, read from the 1.1.1 package:
| Feature | In Romangie 1.1.1 |
|---|---|
| Framework | Bootstrap v3.0.2, with jQuery from WordPress |
| Icons | Glyphicons Halflings and Elegant Icons as web fonts |
| Post formats | aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, chat |
| Widget areas | Primary Sidebar, Left Footer, Middle Footer, Right Footer |
| Page templates | Default page and "Full Width Layout" |
| Translations | English source, German (de_), Polish (pl_), plus a .pot template |
| Other theme supports | Post thumbnails, automatic feed links, HTML5 search and comment markup |
The full-width template drops the sidebar for landing pages or long reads, and the three footer areas sit side by side on desktop and stack on phones. The changelog has two entries: 1.0 was the release, and 1.1 brought "minor bug fixes", WordPress 3.8 tags and language support. Version 1.1.1 has no entry of its own.
Post formats and the Romangie theme demo
Post formats were what Romangie set out to show off. The Romangie theme demo of November 2013 walked through image, gallery, video, audio, status, chat and link posts, with "Who's on First?" as the chat example.
The gallery post held six photos. Two of them, the climbing moss and the Los Angeles skyline, are shown here; the skyline also served as the image post:
The audio post played a 1921 recording of "St. Louis Blues" by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band with Al Bernard, a song written by W. C. Handy:
A demo like this is the quickest way to judge a theme built around post formats. On many themes a post format changes nothing visible; in Romangie the icon beside every post names its format.
The Romangie WordPress theme on WordPress.org
At the time of writing (November 2026), the directory listing and the WordPress.org theme API report the following for the Romangie WordPress theme:
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Version | 1.1.1 |
| First published | 13 December 2013 |
| Last updated | 15 December 2013 |
| Downloads | 17,747 |
| Active installations | 50+ |
| Rating | 96/100 (4.8 of 5 stars) from 6 ratings: five 5-star, one 4-star |
| Minimum WordPress / PHP | Not stated |
Six ratings is a small sample. The Romangie theme download count has accumulated over almost thirteen years, while "50+" active installations is the directory's way of saying fewer than a hundred sites still run it.
Using a 2013 theme with current WordPress and PHP
Romangie predates the block editor (WordPress 5.0, 2018), theme.json and PHP 8. The 1.1.1 package has no editor stylesheet and no theme.json, and it builds the page title with wp_title() instead of declaring title-tag support. The theme still runs without them. The cost is an editing screen that does not match the front end, and block features such as wide or full alignment with no theme styling.
If the theme passes, a child theme is the safe place for changes. No upstream update will overwrite them, and for the same reason no upstream security fix will arrive either, which is the real price of an unmaintained theme.
Romangie theme download
The Romangie WordPress theme installs from the dashboard under Appearance, Themes, Add New, or as a ZIP file from the directory page, where you will find more info and download. Every Romangie theme download is the same package, version 1.1.1, the only one on offer.
One quirk in the bundled readme: its installation steps tell you to search the dashboard for "pinboard", a leftover from another theme. Look the theme up under its own name instead, and check whether the result is still the same 1.1.1 from 2013 before you trust anything written here about it.