Sparkling is a free, clean, fully responsive WordPress theme built on Bootstrap 3, suited to blogs, news and magazine sites, business and portfolio sites, and WooCommerce shops. It ships a full-width slider, four sidebar layouts, dozens of live Customizer options, and translations in over twenty languages.
Live demo · Download from WordPress.org · Documentation · Support forum
- Requirements
- Installation
- Features
- Customizer options
- WooCommerce
- Translations
- Child themes
- Development
- Changelog
- Credits and licensing
| WordPress | 6.0 or newer (tested to 7.0) |
| PHP | 7.4 or newer (tested to 8.5) |
| Browsers | All current evergreen browsers. Internet Explorer is no longer supported. |
From your dashboard — go to Appearance → Themes → Add New, search for Sparkling, then click Install and Activate.
From a zip — download the latest release, then Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme, choose the zip and click Install Now.
Manually — unzip into wp-content/themes/ so the theme lives at wp-content/themes/sparkling/,
then activate it under Appearance → Themes.
After activating, open Appearance → Customize to configure the theme, or Appearance → About Sparkling for a guided setup.
- Fully responsive Bootstrap 3.4.1 layout, mobile and tablet friendly
- Front page slider — full width, pulls from any category, with captions and touch support
- Four sidebar layouts — right, left, none, or full width, set globally or per post, page and product
- Live Customizer options for colours, typography, header, footer and layout
- Call-to-action bar on the front page
- Custom widgets — social icons, popular posts, and an enhanced categories widget
- Post formats — aside, image, video, quote and link
- Sticky navigation, optional
- Author bio box, threaded comments and Gravatar support
- Translation ready, WPML compatible, with 20+ bundled translations
- WooCommerce ready
- No jQuery dependency in the theme's own JavaScript
- Block editor support — responsive embeds, block styles, wide blocks and an editor stylesheet
- Accessibility touches — skip link, visible keyboard focus,
prefers-reduced-motionsupport
All settings live under Appearance → Customize → Sparkling Options:
| Section | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Content | Post excerpts, comments on static pages |
| Slider | On/off, source category, number of slides, slide links |
| Layout | Sidebar position, element colours, WooCommerce page layout |
| Call to action | Text, button label, link, colours |
| Typography | Body font family, size, weight and colour |
| Header | Background, link and hover colours, sticky navigation |
| Footer | Background, text and link colours, social icons, custom footer text |
| Social | Social icon menu, Academicons for academic profiles |
| Archive | Custom titles for tag, category, author and date archives |
Sparkling supports WooCommerce out of the box — shop, product, cart, checkout and account pages all inherit the theme's styling, and product galleries get zoom, lightbox and slider support.
WooCommerce pages have their own layout setting under Layout Options, and individual products can override it from the layout box in the editor sidebar.
The theme overrides no WooCommerce templates, so it stays compatible as WooCommerce updates.
Sparkling ships .po/.mo catalogues for 20+ locales in languages/, plus an up-to-date
sparkling.pot for new translations.
Translations are also managed on translate.wordpress.org, and language packs from there take precedence over the bundled files.
Sparkling is built to be extended. Template functions are wrapped in function_exists() so a child theme
can redefine them, and the theme exposes filters such as sparkling_allow_google_fonts and
sparkling_custom_background_args.
If you override template files in a child theme, note that the wrapper markup is split across three files:
header.php opens the page containers, sidebar.php closes .main-content-inner before emitting
#secondary, and footer.php closes the rest. A template that skips get_sidebar() must close
.main-content-inner itself — see page-fullwidth.php.
The theme ships ready to run; there is no build step required to use it.
git clone https://github.com/ColorlibHQ/Sparkling.git
# symlink or copy into wp-content/themes/sparklingstyle.css and the files in assets/css/ are edited directly. Minified assets are committed alongside
their sources and must be regenerated by hand when the source changes:
npx terser assets/js/widget.js -c -m -o assets/js/widget.min.jsBug reports and pull requests are welcome on the issue tracker.
The full version history, from 1.0 in April 2014 to the current release, is in
changelog.txt. It is also rendered in the WordPress dashboard under
Appearance → About Sparkling → Changelog.
Sparkling, Copyright 2014–2026 Colorlib. Distributed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later — see gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html.
Sparkling is based on Underscores, (C) 2012–2015 Automattic, Inc., licensed GPLv2 or later.
Bundled third-party resources:
| Resource | Version | License |
|---|---|---|
| Bootstrap | 3.4.1 | MIT |
| FlexSlider | 2.7.0 | GPLv2 |
| Font Awesome Free | 5.1.1 | Icons CC BY 4.0, Fonts SIL OFL 1.1, Code MIT |
| Academicons | 1.8.6 | Fonts SIL OFL 1.1, Code MIT |
| WP Bootstrap Navwalker | — | GPLv2 or later |
Unless otherwise noted, all images are created by Colorlib and distributed under the same license as the theme.