Upsells, Barriers, and the End/Beginning of the Quality $free Themes Era

The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the …

Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas WordPress Theme for Building Single-Page Websites

Split Screen pattern from Blank Canvas. On Monday, Automattic announced its Blank Canvas theme on WordPress.com. The goal is to allow end-users to build single-page websites, such as an “about me” or product landing page. Blank Canvas is a child theme of Seedlet, which Automattic’s Theme Team has been using as a launchpad. One example is its recently-released Spearhead child …

Blocked-Based Version of Twenty Twenty-One Nearing Readiness for the Theme Directory

Twenty Twenty-One Blocks, now renamed to TT1 Blocks, is inching its way toward the WordPress theme directory. Kjell Reigstad mentioned the prospect in this week’s block-based themes meeting. Contributors to the theme, which is part of the Theme Experiments project, have pushed some much-needed code updates to the repository. TT1 Blocks is the block-based version of the Twenty Twenty-One theme. …

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 ThemeForest. Nearly every theme development …

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 repository’s Carrd-like landing page theme, …

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 Gutenberg plugin, which will automatically …

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, theme authors have needed to …