Themes

  • Block System Will Create More Commercial Opportunities for WordPress Theme Authors

    Block System Will Create More Commercial Opportunities for WordPress Theme Authors

    Ten years ago, a potential WordPress theme buyer might stumble upon a site like ThemeForest. The themes on the site would primarily tout the hundreds of shortcodes they included. These shortcodes would allow the user to build anything they wanted with simple BBCode-like brackets around some tag or another. The practice was not limited to…

  • Armando WordPress Theme Provides Insight Into the Current State of Full Site Editing

    Armando WordPress Theme Provides Insight Into the Current State of Full Site Editing

    As we inch closer to a year in which WordPress’s primary focus will be on Full Site Editing, it is fortunate timing that Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark publicly announced her latest theme, Armando. It is a blogging theme that makes use of the latest features from the Gutenberg plugin. The theme is currently awaiting…

  • Exploring Photo Blocks, an Experimental FSE-Ready Photoblogging Theme

    Exploring Photo Blocks, an Experimental FSE-Ready Photoblogging Theme

    Kjell Reigstad announced the Photo Blocks theme on December 9. It is a part of an ongoing set of experimental work from the WordPress Theme Experiments repository on GitHub. It is essentially a testbed of ideas that are helping to propel the upcoming block-based theming era. In the past few months, I have covered the…

  • Jump Start Block-Based Theme Development With the FSE Theme Generator

    Jump Start Block-Based Theme Development With the FSE Theme Generator

    Block-based themes are not complicated. Their structure is almost simple enough that developers are unlikely to need a tool to generate a blank theme. However, for those unfamiliar with how themes are built for the upcoming full-site editing (FSE) feature, a boilerplate is a good place to start. The Theme Experiments repository now has a…

  • Block-Based Bosco, Second Full-Site Editing Theme Lands in the WordPress Directory

    Block-Based Bosco, Second Full-Site Editing Theme Lands in the WordPress Directory

    Fränk Klein, a Principal Engineer at Human Made, is now the second theme developer to release a block-based theme to the WordPress theme directory. Block-Based Bosco is a recreation of his Bosco theme, which he released in 2014. Block-based themes, also called FSE (full-site editing) themes, are currently experimental. They require the use of the…

  • Genesis Block Theme Beta, StudioPress Pursuing a Block-First Future

    Genesis Block Theme Beta, StudioPress Pursuing a Block-First Future

    On November 11, StudioPress announced an open beta for its Genesis Block Theme. This is a pivotal moment, or at least one moment in a series of significant moments, for adoption of the block editor. Feel free to call me on this in a year or two if it does not pan out. The original…

  • WordPress To Combine Its Long-Neglected Theme Previewer With Starter Content

    WordPress To Combine Its Long-Neglected Theme Previewer With Starter Content

    Six weeks ago, WordPress 5.6 release lead Helen Hou-Sandí breathed new life into two almost-forgotten features around the WordPress website and platform. The idea was to take the starter content feature, which themes can optionally add for new installs, and apply it to the WordPress.org theme preview system. It was not a new idea. However,…

  • Themes Team Removes Outdated CSS Guidelines, Adds Stricter Requirement for Links in Content

    Themes Team Removes Outdated CSS Guidelines, Adds Stricter Requirement for Links in Content

    In yesterday’s twice-monthly meeting, the WordPress Themes Team made a couple of important changes to the official theme directory guidelines. They removed a requirement of some CSS classes that have long been sitting on the chopping block. They also implemented the third stage in their long-term plan to make all WordPress themes accessibility-ready. For years,…

  • Automattic Releases Spearhead, a Seedlet Child Theme Aimed at Podcasters and Content Creators

    Automattic Releases Spearhead, a Seedlet Child Theme Aimed at Podcasters and Content Creators

    Last Thursday, Automattic announced its new Spearhead theme to WordPress.com users, which primarily focuses on podcasters. However, the team has marketed it toward content creators in general. It is a child theme of the company’s recently-released Seedlet theme. Cece Yu originally created the design for the Spearhead podcast, which is currently in use on the…

  • Twenty Twenty-One Blocks Theme Launching as a Separate Project

    Twenty Twenty-One Blocks Theme Launching as a Separate Project

    Last Friday, Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark announced the Twenty Twenty-One Blocks theme project. It is a block-based version of the Twenty Twenty-One default theme that is shipping along with WordPress 5.6. It will work with the site editor available in the Gutenberg plugin. Developers will work on the two themes as separate projects. The…

  • Carrd-Like Theme Experiment Provides a Glimpse Into the Future of Theming

    Carrd-Like Theme Experiment Provides a Glimpse Into the Future of Theming

    It is no secret that I think the future of theming with WordPress is bright, that the Gutenberg project will eventually pay off. As a former full-time theme developer, I lived through the years where there were no standards for how to build certain features. It was much like the Wild West. There were vast,…

  • Q: First FSE WordPress Theme Now Live

    Q: First FSE WordPress Theme Now Live

    Themes Team representative Ari Stathopoulos is now officially the first theme author to have a theme in the directory that supports full-site editing (FSE). With a slimmed-down beta release of FSE shipping in WordPress 5.6 this December, someone had to be the first to take the plunge. It made sense for someone intimately familiar with…

  • Past Twenty* WordPress Themes To Get New Block Patterns

    Past Twenty* WordPress Themes To Get New Block Patterns

    Mel Choyce-Dwan, the Default Theme Design Lead for WordPress 5.6, kick-started 10 tickets around two months ago that would bring new features to the old default WordPress themes. The proposal is to add unique block patterns, a feature added to WordPress 5.5, to all of the previous 10 Twenty* themes. It is a lofty goal…