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Remember That Facebook Timeline WordPress Theme? We Brought It Back from the Dead.

Does anyone remember that WordPress theme that perfectly mimicked Facebook’s Timeline? It had the same dual-column layout, profile-style design, and that signature scrolling experience. It was pretty popular around 2011, but like many niche WordPress themes from that era, it slowly faded into obscurity.

I’ll admit — I had completely forgotten about it too. But recently, curiosity struck. I wondered: was it still around? Could it even work with modern WordPress?

Finding the theme was harder than expected.
You’d think a once-popular theme like this would be easy to find — maybe archived somewhere, mirrored on a forum, or even available from its original source, timeline-wp.com. But no. The original site is long gone, taken offline supposedly due to copyright concerns with Facebook. Most links out there still point to that now-defunct site.

After digging through just about every archive and obscure corner of the internet, I finally managed to get my hands on a copy — and yes, it appears to be the original version that was once hosted on timeline-wp.com.

But getting the theme was just the first challenge. Making it work in 2025? That was a whole different story.

When I tried to activate the theme on a fresh WordPress install, it threw fatal errors right away. Turns out, the folder name needed to be renamed to timeline-wp — a small fix, but not the last one. Even after activation, several errors popped up. After doing some searching to try to figure out how to activate it, someone did mention that on the configuration page (wp-config.php) To allow the script show errors.

So what changed?
Looking through the code, I noticed the theme was heavily based on the default Twenty Eleven WordPress theme — just heavily customized to mimic Facebook’s design. That gave me an idea: why not use the latest version of Twenty Eleven, which is still updated and compatible with modern WordPress?

I compared the two themes side by side and isolated the differences. There was one particular folder “inc” that I was able to completely replace, I deleted all of the files that came originally with this theme and then replaced it with the files from 2011 theme, which this seemed to do the trick.

After a few tweaks, some debugging, and minor code replacements, it finally worked — a fully functional Facebook Timeline WordPress theme in 2025.

The theme had a flash-based video embedded in the header. Since flash is long dead, I edited header.php removed the flash video line, and restored a clean, non-flash header by borrowing codeing from the updated Twenty Eleven theme. Even on Facebook, when Facebook originally looked much like this the header near the profile image did not have a video background.

While it is not perfect, as there are some bugs that still need to be fixed, at least I can use the theme and get that feel from back when it was available in 2011. One last thing I did do is edit the configuration file (wp-config.php) to hind any errors for now.

In the screenshot below is what the homepage (index) looks like.

In the screenshot below is what a post would look like.

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