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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
WordPress 5.6 is set to include a new default theme, Twenty Twenty-One, designed to give users a blank canvas for the block editor. The theme doesn’t fall under any particular category and is meant to be suitable for use across different types of websites. One new feature that has very recently come under consideration is…
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…
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…
Starter content. It was a grand idea, one of those big dreams of WordPress. It was the new kid on the block in late 2016. Like the introduction of post formats in 2011, the developer community was all in for at least that particular release version. Then, it was on to the next new thing,…