Anders Norén, a Swedish designer and prolific WordPress theme developer, has released Oaknut, a new profile block theme reminiscent of services like Linktree and Carrd. The theme is for users who want a simple profile landing page with relevant social and work links, but it could also be easily expanded to capture email addresses for a newsletter, add a blog, or serve as a placeholder for a coming soon website.
Oaknut includes just three templates: Home (displays posts on the homepage, or on the Posts page if a static homepage is set), Index (displays posts), and 404 (displays when no content is found). Users who want to expand the theme beyond the basic use case can add more templates through the Site Editor or even create their own custom templates.
The demo looks just like the screenshot, and there are no other pages to view. After installing and activating the theme, clicking on Customize will go to the Site Editor where everything you see in the demo is already in place, ready to be replaced with your own profile data and links.
If the bright mustard color is too much for your taste, you’re in luck with Oaknut, because it packages a whopping 23 different style variations. Norén has also included 14 font families, eight button styles, and five styles for social links.
As one of the pioneers in the block themes category Norén ensured Oaknut was ready to showcase new features released in WordPress 6.1. The theme supports fluid typography, spacing sizes, root padding aware elements, pseudo selector styles in theme.json, and theme.json styling for elements like buttons, captions, and headings.
“This enables Oaknut to have a really small CSS file,” Norén said. “It comes in at less than 150 lines, and 120 of those lines are for the custom block styles included in the theme. Combine that with locally hosted variable fonts and the complete lack of JavaScript in the theme, and you end up with some pretty speedy profile pages.”
Norén shared a screenshot of a website using the theme with a Lighthouse performance score of 100.
Oaknut is a good choice for WordPress users who want a simple, attractive theme that shows how people can connect with them. It is also great for those who are just starting out with a web presence or domains that need a nicely- designed placeholder.
The theme is available on WordPress.org to download for free. Norén has also created a GitHub Sponsors account for anyone who wants to support the continued development of his 26 free WordPress themes and future theme releases.
It seems a nice theme to a quick start.
And so good to see these performance ratings.
Besides this one, which themes would you recommend with less styles (weight) for a clean start for designers, for someone who just wants a blank & efficient canvas to start templating?