WordPress Themes Team Releases Stacks: A Community Theme for Building Slide Decks

WordPress’ Themes Team has released a new block theme called Stacks as part of the Community Themes initiative proposed earlier this year. The goal is to bring together representatives of the team to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported.

Stacks was designed for one purpose – to create slide decks that can be used for a presentation. It was designed and built by Saxon Fletcher with help from Automattic-sponsored contributor Ben Dwyer.

The theme includes a simple setup flow. After installing Stacks and clicking ‘Customize,’ the user is taken to the Site Editor where a set of five slides is already pre-filled on the home page in a warm and inviting color palette.

Slides can also be created on any post or page using the “Stacks” pattern. After creating a new page, the user is presented with the option to start the page by inserting the Stacks pattern. This loads the same five sample slides that are included on the home page by default. They can be easily edited so that any page or post contains its own unique slide deck.

The Stacks theme looks just as good on mobile as it does on desktop, making it easy to follow along from different devices.

The theme was built for a small niche use case – people who want to host their own slides – and is not likely to be widely adopted but presents an interesting use of the block editor for creating slides. Some users may find this to be more user friendly than working with a third-party application to build their presentations.

Since a different deck can be hosted on each page or post, someone who wants to create a website devoted entirely to hosting their own slide presentations could easily save them all in the same place, share links to the different decks, and avoid having to use a hosted service that may not be around forever.

Stacks is available for free on WordPress.org and users can expect these Community Themes to have some level of support as they are being hosted by the official WordPress.org account.