Guest post by Richard

MistyLook, with its clean and pleasant design has always been a very popular theme around WordPress.com, but being a very old theme, it had limitations, especially when compared to all the new themes that have been released over the past year. MistyLook also suffered from some top navigation issues due to the placement of the built-in search box which was at the right end of the navigation area.

The Theme Team here at WordPress.com though, decided to breathe new life into this popular classic.

Custom Menu Support

Shortly after the implementation of custom menus into WordPress, staff updated MistyLook to support them. This was a welcome addition since the placement of the search box at the right end of the top navigation limited how many tabs you could have. With custom menu support, you could organize your menu items in dropdowns, and even include categories and custom links.

Hide the Search Box

There were a lot of forum posts asking how to hide or move the search box because the user needed the additional space for their navigation tabs. It used to be that if you wanted to hide the search box, you had to purchase the CSS upgrade and hide it via CSS. Now all you have to do is go to Appearance > Theme Options and simply check a box and the search box is gone.

Hide Single Post Navigation

Another thing that some were not fond of are the previous and next links that appeared at the top of the single-post pages. If you do not like those, you can now go to Appearance > Theme Options and turn them off.

Custom Background

Two other popular MistyLook requests were changing the background color and adding a background image. Now, instead of having to get the CSS upgrade, all you have to do is go to Appearance > Background and you can add a background image, or a custom background color.