Nick Hamze has called for making WordPress themes exciting and the web weird again. “WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules. The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts.”, he said. He believes there are plenty of good themes in the Repository…
The WordPress Themes Repository has hit an exciting milestone of 1,000 block themes. As of today, the repository has over 12,000 free themes. Block themes were introduced in WordPress 5.9 allowing users to create and customize all aspects of their site using the block editor. This ushered in a new era of site design, and…
Last week, the lineup for the eighteen-member release squad and the default theme for WordPress 6.7 were revealed. This will be the third and final WordPress release of the year. WordPress 6.7 Release Squad As usual, Matt Mullenweg leads the release, with David Baumwald serving as the Release Coordinator. The Core Tech Leads are Peter…
The article delves into the popularity of WP.org themes, employing a lighthearted approach and original metrics such as “usage rate” and “enthusiasm gap” to assess user preferences and enthusiasm for different WP themes.
Moog is one of the latest free block themes to be released on WordPress.org. It features a minimal and bold layout with a responsive, masonry style grid on the homepage. Moog is well suited to blogs or even small magazine websites, with options to radically change the style with the click of a button. Moog’s…
WordPress contributors have updated the Theme Handbook to include a new chapter on block templating. The chapter covers how the WordPress block template system works, how to build custom templates and parts and include them in a theme. This is critical documentation designed to provide a learning path for those who are building their first…
Munich-based digital agency owner Hendrik Luehrsen has been tracking the usage of themes with the FSE tag (block themes) using a spreadsheet that pulls in data from the WordPress.org API. Wrangling the data in a spreadsheet became too cumbersome, so Luehrsen launched WP Data Dashboard over the weekend as a “centralized hub for exploring, analyzing,…
The Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, now has a companion plugin available called Ollie Dash. The theme made headlines earlier this month after a contentious WordPress.org review process led its authors to remove the innovative onboarding features. Ollie was approved for WordPress.org but without the time-saving onboarding features its authors…
WordPress 6.4 will be shipping a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four (TT4), expected in early November. This theme is more feature-rich than previous default themes, and contributors have been working on identifying potential performance improvements that can be made ahead of the release. As a starting point, Google-sponsored Performance team contributor Felix Arntz conducted several…
The free Ollie block theme, created by Mike McAlister and Patrick Posner, is now available for download on WordPress.org. A contentious review process led the team to remove the onboarding features, despite having gotten the green light from WordPress’ leadership who advocated for moving forward with the experiment. The version of Ollie available on WordPress.org…
Mike McAlister, creator of the free Ollie theme, will be dropping the innovative onboarding features from the theme in favor of putting them into a separate plugin after facing pushback during the review for inclusion in WordPress.org’s Themes Directory. During what McAlister described as an “unnecessarily contentious” review process that turned unproductive and combative at certain points,…
Mike McAlister, creator of the free Ollie theme, has been working towards getting his theme approved for hosting on WordPress.org. Ollie went into public beta in April 2023 and gained momentum over the next few months when McAlister previewed the theme’s new onboarding wizard. WordPress users have been slow to adopt the block editor and block themes…
WordPress 6.4 will be shipping with a new default theme, expected in early November. The theme’s project leaders unveiled the designs and concept for Twenty Twenty-Four in an announcement on WordPress.org today. For those who have complained that past default themes have been too niche or too narrowly focused in design, this theme will take…
WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser, makes it possible for users to quickly test plugins and themes without having to set up a local development environment. Ordinarily, testing a plugin or theme with Playground requires visiting playground.wordpress.net, which will instantly create a real WordPress instance with admin access without having…
WordPress’ Themes team launched its Community Themes initiative earlier this year with the goal of bringing together contributors to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported. Their first theme release was Stacks, a single-purpose theme for creating slide decks that can be used for a presentation.…