Molten is a new block theme from first-time WordPress.org theme author Paul Truong, designed for chefs and restaurateurs to showcase their work. The theme puts the spotlight on food photography offset with bold typography featuring the Playfair Display font for headings and Source Sans Pro for paragraph text.
Truong is working on setting up a marketing site for the theme so there is no demo at this time. One drawback is that it does not include any full-page patterns where you can quickly build a homepage or menu page without having to think about how the design should go together. You will have to rely on your own sense of design but Molten comes packaged with ample patterns for building pages.
Molten has four different hero patterns, three “coming soon” patterns, and six “call to action” patterns in various layouts (media and text, full width cover with text and button, and three columns with images and content). The theme also comes with a large gallery block pattern and multiple location pattern designs.
There’s almost nothing worse than a restaurant website that makes you download a PDF menu. It’s not mobile or SEO-friendly, and downloading a separate file is a terrible user experience. Restaurateurs have traditionally used PDFs because it’s easier to update it by uploading and replacing the old files. It’s also easier to design it to approximate the printed menu. Blocks can make it easier for restaurants to abandon this practice of using PDFs. A block-based menu can be quickly edited and expanded as necessary without messing with uploading any files.
Molten includes four Menu block patterns with different layouts for wine lists, dishes, and pricing.
Molten packages nine templates and five template parts for users who want to dig into full-site editing. There are multiple light and dark footer and header designs, search, archive, a completely blank template, and more. It includes four style variations which can significantly change the mood of the website.
Overall, the theme has just about anything a restaurant or “coming soon” establishment may need in terms of layout and design. The default color palette has a simple black and white typography-forward design that puts the emphasis on the food. Molten is available for free from the WordPress Themes Directory.
I must say slowly base Gutenberg (without many plugins) is coming together and the vision that eluded me for so long is forming in front of my minds eye. Basically it offers a simple interface to newcomers or clients and all those tweaking are done through theme.json and and the HTML templates.
Only thing missing would be flexible interface (maybe as a plug-in) to edit theme.json… maybe a tree viewer with some mappings and auto detections for the best interface component. That would be a nice No-Code replacement for the customizer without giving up on the flexibility and open structure of theme.json while still offering an interface to the No-Code tweakers.