It seems that Andrew Starr is quietly building a legion of block themes. He is the sole developer behind UXL Themes and has released six of them in the past year, with most landing in the last few months. Framboise, his latest project, is a child theme of Alara. He promised a new design variation,…
I have had a block theme idea rattling around in my brain for a while. For months, I have considered building a single-page profile/card theme, and I finally sat down and put in the work over the weekend. In part, I just wanted to do this for fun. However, another part of me wanted to…
Block themes are trickling into the official WordPress Themes Directory at a slow rate ahead of full-site editing’s debut in WordPress 5.9. There are now 39 themes that support site editing features, up from 28 in December 2021, when Matt Mullenweg commented on it during the State of the Word address. “That needs to be…
All the block themes seem to have something similar in how they look. Although unique in their own ways, being generally wide, spacy, and modular instantly make them look like they came from the same mold. This is not to say they’re bad though… I’m just not really fond of such design. I prefer something…
Sometimes the sweetest things in life are the simplest. Automattic’s latest block theme landed in the review queue yesterday, and I had to give it a spin. What I found was a minimally-elegant design that I fell in love with. Really. I even dedicated an entire demo post on my install to it: Well, that…
WordPress 5.9 is set to launch on January 25, and many users will be in for a surprise. The upcoming release will be the most monumental shift in how the platform works since the introduction of the block-based content editor in 5.0. Block themes, global styles, and the site editor will kick-start a new future…
Yesterday, Anariel Design’s third block theme, Bricksy, went live in the WordPress.org directory. Ana Segota, the co-founder and self-proclaimed “creative motor” of the company, has almost become a master at block-based theme design at this point, and this project is just her showing off her skills. I actually took the theme for a spin over…
In the dawn of the block theme era, the WordPress theme directory could use a reimagining. That is what Munir Kamal set out to do before WordPress 5.9 launches later this month. He announced an alternative theme directory on the Gutenberg Hub website earlier today. It lists all the block themes that are officially hosted…
Brian Gardner announced today that WP Engine has acquired his latest project, Frost. In an email sent out to all customers, Gardner said his team had issued refunds to all current customers. The business model is changing, and Frost will be a freely-available project going forward and focus on full site editing. Frost is a…
Do you know if WordPress FSE is working to make it easier to create block patterns? Templates and Parts need to just click a button to download them. But patterns are very manual, and you need to register all of them programmatically. Thiago You are not the first person to ask this question, and it…
It is literally the one thing that no one was asking for, but we can all collectively agree is kind of cool. A block-based version of the old-school Kubrick WordPress theme exists. Gutenberg lead Matías Ventura tweeted a quick video of it in action yesterday. Fellow Automattic engineer Riad Benguella had put the theme together.…
David Gwyer has been teasing ThemeGen over the last couple of weeks. It is his upcoming block theme generator app. Piece by piece, it has seemed to be coming together and could prove invaluable for theme developers. Currently, it is in beta testing. He provided me with a link to an early preview to get…
One month ago, UXL Themes released Alara. It was a theme that carried with it one bold promise: every week for the next year, users could expect a new design variation, child theme, or block pattern. And, all of this would be done on the back of the block theme system that is slated to…
Last week, I played around with a new plugin that allows users to export a custom theme.json file. The project is still a little buggy at the moment, but I look forward to covering it in more detail soon. The export function was more of a secondary objective for the plugin, but it represents a…
I read some posts from “Ask the Bartender,” and I appreciate it a lot! Thanks. I have a question now. :) I want to refine my WordPress theme development process, which is: To make a unique-creative design with Adobe XD or Figma. To convert it to static HTML using VS Code with Bootstrap. In WordPress,…