WordPress’ Themes team launched its Community Themes initiative earlier this year with the goal of bringing together contributors to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported. Their first theme release was Stacks, a single-purpose theme for creating slide decks that can be used for a presentation.
The team has now released its second community theme called Blue Note, inspired by American jazz record label “Blue Note Records.” It’s more versatile than Stacks, as it can be used for writing/blogging, a personal website, portfolio, nonprofit, memorial, event, or other types of landing pages.
Although Blue Note does not package any style variations, it comes with 14 beautifully designed patterns inspired by jazz record covers. The patterns enable users to quickly add images with text or quotes with multiple designs for each. There are also patterns with striped images, an artful way to break up a single image, paired with text. Users can select from multiple headers and footers, among seven page templates and four template parts.
Blue Note was designed by Automattic-sponsored contributor Beatriz Fialho, inspired by her work on the State of the Word slides in 2020. It was developed during the WCEU contributor day with the help of more than a dozen contributors.  The Community Themes GitHub repository has other themes they are working on which are in various stages of development.
Check out Blue Note on WordPress.org and download it for free via the Themes browser inside the admin.
Hey is a block theme designed by Automattic for users on WordPress.com and also released for free in the WordPress.org Themes Directory. It’s the kind of simple theme that enables you to quickly get started writing online, without having to configure a bunch of design elements. The homepage features a profile image (Site Logo), site title, and recent posts with dates.
Single posts display with the feature image at the top of the post, although this template can easily be edited if this is an undesirable feature. Previous and Next post navigation appears under the post. Users can add menu items to display at the top, but clicking the site logo brings the visitor back home in the absence of a navigation menu.
The Hey theme comes in two different styles – the default and a serif variation. Colors can be adjusted to create a more vibrant palette for the site design.
One major drawback to this theme, which may not be immediately evident by looking at the demo, is that if users want to display more than the three most recent posts, they will need to add the pagination block inside the query loop block. It will also need to be styled to match the theme better. The query loop can be edited to show more posts on the homepage.
Although Hey is a simple personal blog theme, it also comes packaged with templates for WooCommerce compatibility. This is likely for the benefit of WordPress.com users who may want to quickly fire up a store. Self-hosted users who want to sell products with WooCommerce will be able to easily display things like the mini-cart, customer account block, product archive, product search results, and more.
Overall, Hey is an elegantly simple block theme with a clean design and plentiful white space. It’s suitable for the person who wants an almost blank slate to get started, or just a theme that enables writing without any distraction for the reader. Check out the live demo on WordPress.com and download Hey from WordPress.org.
Shufflehound made a big splash in March when it released Lemmony, a free WordPress block theme with more than 30 patterns. This was the company’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is already active on more than 1,000 websites. Building on the success of this theme, Shufflehound has created a child theme for agencies.
Lemmony Agency bears a strong resemblance to its parent theme but with more agency-specific patterns. This theme ships with 25 new custom block patterns, on top of the ones already included in Lemmony, for a total of more than 50 patterns.
The patterns unique to this theme suit agencies but would also work well for non-profits, advocacy, portfolios, or businesses of any kind. These include a hero with services, accordions for things like FAQ, counters, more pricing tables, services with icons or images, a blockified sidebar, testimonials, and more.
The theme’s creators have done an excellent job in organizing all the patterns available to users. Inside the pattern explorer/inserter, they have been separated into different panels for the patterns specific to the Lemmony Agency theme, the Lemmony patterns, and the Lemmony full-page patterns. This makes it easier to build pages, since users won’t have to hunt through all the patterns lumped together.
The Lemmony Companion plugin, recommended when users install the theme, adds a handful of custom blocks that some of the patterns rely on to work. It includes blocks for a counter, icon, post featured image caption, typing text, hero auto-slider, and accordion.
This might be the best way to ensure these features are styled exactly to match the theme and give users more creative control inside these particular blocks. Sometimes using third-party plugins to add sliders or icons can look like it’s bolted onto the design in an unsightly way. A companion plugin designated specifically for this theme makes sense in this instance.
Shufflehound made an interesting choice creating Lemmony Agency as a child theme of what is already a very flexible multi-purpose theme. This certainly could have been shipped as full-page pattern but it would have also greatly expanded the patterns packaged with the parent theme. In these early days of block theming, it’s not yet clear what users might consider “pattern bloat” or too many patterns, especially since they can easily be categorized under various panels inside the explorer.
Lemmony Agency is a solid option for building websites that need to showcase their services, display pricing, or simply maintain an informational web presence. It’s available for free from WordPress.org and will auto-install the parent theme at the same time.
The WordPress Themes Directory is now hosting more than 300 block themes, a milestone for the dedicated theme developers who have persevered through the growing pains and evolution of block theming. WP Engine is one of the newest theme authors who helped put the directory over the 300 mark with its submission of Frost.
With its clean, minimal design, 36 patterns, and impeccable attention to detail on block styles, Frost is positioned to quickly become another blockbuster multipurpose theme. It already has more than 1,000 users as it has been in testing for awhile before landing in the official directory.
Frost’s typography features Outfit, a geometric sans-serif font, for both header and paragraph text.
The default color scheme is black and white with a vibrant blue accent color but Frost comes with eight different style variations. Frost designer Brian Gardner showcases a few in the tweet below, with Gutenberg’s full-screen previews for styles.
Feast your eyes on the latest Style Variations setting in the Site Editor, now with full-screen previews. It's currently in Gutenberg and will likely make its grand entrance in #WordPress 6.3! pic.twitter.com/r7r20GjcdS
When first installing the theme on a new WordPress site, clicking Customize takes the user to the Site Editor with the homepage template pre-filled so there’s no guesswork involved. Users can immediately start customizing any of the included templates. Frost packages all the usual ones – 404, archive, home, index, page, search, and single, but also includes a blank template and a “no title” template to help users with content that works better without the requirement of a title.
Frost includes 36 patterns for building everything from pricing tables to portfolios, calls-to-action, testimonials, a grid of team members, various heroes, feature boxes, and more. Many of them have dark and light variations.
There are also four full-page layouts that users can insert to build pages and launch websites faster, including About, Pricing, Home, and Links pages.
Frost could easily be used for building agency websites, portfolios, business, sites, and more. It’s easy to see developers using it as a starter for multiple projects given its minimal design. If website builders are looking for an even more minimalist starting point, Gardner’s Powder theme is a stripped down fork of Frost.
Check out the Frost theme on its own website at frostwp.com, which includes examples of all the patterns, layouts, styles, documentation, and more. Frost is available to download for free from WordPress.org.
WordPress’ Themes Team has released a new block theme called Stacks as part of the Community Themes initiative proposed earlier this year. The goal is to bring together representatives of the team to build block themes year round, the same way that default themes are built and officially supported.
Stacks was designed for one purpose – to create slide decks that can be used for a presentation. It was designed and built by Saxon Fletcher with help from Automattic-sponsored contributor Ben Dwyer.
The theme includes a simple setup flow. After installing Stacks and clicking ‘Customize,’ the user is taken to the Site Editor where a set of five slides is already pre-filled on the home page in a warm and inviting color palette.
Slides can also be created on any post or page using the “Stacks” pattern. After creating a new page, the user is presented with the option to start the page by inserting the Stacks pattern. This loads the same five sample slides that are included on the home page by default. They can be easily edited so that any page or post contains its own unique slide deck.
The Stacks theme looks just as good on mobile as it does on desktop, making it easy to follow along from different devices.
The theme was built for a small niche use case – people who want to host their own slides – and is not likely to be widely adopted but presents an interesting use of the block editor for creating slides. Some users may find this to be more user friendly than working with a third-party application to build their presentations.
Since a different deck can be hosted on each page or post, someone who wants to create a website devoted entirely to hosting their own slide presentations could easily save them all in the same place, share links to the different decks, and avoid having to use a hosted service that may not be around forever.
Stacks is available for free on WordPress.org and users can expect these Community Themes to have some level of support as they are being hosted by the official WordPress.org account.
Today’s article is aimed at designers, photographers, freelancers, and other creative folks who want to build stunning portfolio websites.
If you still have no online portfolio or your portfolio website looks a little dated, consider one of the following 10 WordPress themes. All of these themes have a clean and modern style layout your visitors will enjoy. Also, they’re responsive and GPL Compatible (each theme can be used as many times as you wish). And of course, the WordPress themes featured in this article are compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
WordPress developer Mike McAlister has launched Ollie, his first block theme, into public beta. McAlister, whose theme company Array Themes was acquired by WP Engine in 2018, along with the Atomic Blocks plugin, recently departed from his role at the company to pursue other projects.
Ollie supports all the latest Site Editor features, including global styles, patterns, templates, and template parts. It is a beautiful, multipurpose theme of the high caliber one might expect from McAlister, a veteran developer whose past products were well known for their minimalist and clean design.
Ollie includes an impressive set of more than 50 custom block patterns, making page building a delight. There are page sections for testimonials, company logos, multiple hero designs, pricing tables, various headers and footers, calls to action, and more. Ollie includes six different full-page patterns for the homepage, about, profile, features, pricing, and a download page. They are featured on the theme’s live demo under the Patterns menu item.
Ollie includes seven style variations, with blue, green, orange, pink, red, and teal accent color palettes in addition to the default.
Like many other block themes, Ollie is speedy, getting top scores on Google’s Pagespeed Insights.
“One of the most powerful performance features is the selective loading of assets,” McAlister said. “Instead of loading a large stylesheet on every page, Ollie only loads the styles needed on the page. This results in a much smaller page size, far less page requests, and an instantly-loading page, which search engines love.”
After testing Ollie, I found the user experience to be friendly and an accurate representation of one of the taglines for the theme: “Get a 40 hour head start.” As soon as users install the theme and click “Customize,” they are taken directly to the Site Editor with the front page template pre-populated to match the demo site. This, combined with all the improvements in the Site Editor in WordPress 6.1, creates a smooth editing experience.
Although it hasn’t been officially released yet, Ollie could be one of the next majorly successful block themes, with its sheer number of patterns and flexibility for so many different use cases.
Ollie is currently on GitHub during the public beta but McAlister plans to get it approved for WordPress.org after more testing. He is not yet sure whether he will be jumping back into the commercial theme market.
“With this first block theme, my goal is simply to learn as much as possible about block themes, how users are using them, and what kind of potential there is for a premium offering,” McAlister told the Tavern. “This flagship theme will remain as an educational tool and will be free for all to use. Although I have some ideas for monetization, the reality is that we don’t know much about how users will take to block themes or what kind of premium features they’re willing to pay for yet.
“We’re very early in this new paradigm, so I’m taking the opportunity to ask lots of questions learn about the problems users are facing. What I do know is that any modern commercial WordPress product needs a supreme customer experience and a wealth of quality education to help users navigate all of these new features and drive adoption.”
WordPress.org has 286 block themes available and even the best ones have just a few thousand active installs. Building block themes that people will want to use is a new frontier, even for McAlister whose former company was a war-horse in the Classic Themes era.
“Block themes are going to be a game changer for many different personas of WordPress users,” McAlister said. “Being able to customize virtually every aspect of your site is super powerful, but it means that block themes have a lot more moving parts than classic themes. Theme.json, global styles, patterns, templates, template parts — all of these have to be accounted for and they all have to work together seamlessly for an excellent block theme experience.”
WordPress theme developers are still getting a handle on these changes but the Themes Team is putting a stake in the ground by making block theming the focus of the Theme Handbook overhaul. Although Classic Themes will still have a chapter in the handbook, the Themes Team has made it clear that block themes are “the present and future of WordPress.”
“Since a lot of the block theme building is done in the editor, it requires a new mastery of the editor that few are intimately familiar with yet,” McAlister said. “To build patterns or layouts, you need to know which blocks to use, how to structure them effectively, how to leverage your design system in theme.json, and you need a good design sense to pull it all together.
“However, when it all finally comes together, block themes provide an unmatched site building and editing experience in comparison to classic themes. I’m very optimistic about the opportunity to revitalize the WordPress theme space, but it’s going to take a lot of work and collective education to get there.”
Lemmony is a new WordPress block theme designed by the team at Shufflehound, a theme development company based in Europe with commercial products on Themeforest. This is the team’s first block theme on WordPress.org and it is a strong debut.
Lemmony is a beautifully-designed multipurpose theme that would work well for businesses, agencies, and portfolio websites. It features the Plus Jakarta Sans font face for both headings and paragraph text, a geometric sans serif style, designed by Gumpita Rahayu from Tokotype.
The homepage includes bold, full-width immersive images offset with calls-to-action and blocks featuring a variety of different ways to present information. Scrolling the page reveals tasteful (and optional) animation that brings the content to life.
Lemmony packages more than 30 custom block patterns to help users design and build pages. These include multiple heroes with lists and calls-to-action, heroes with images and titles, partner logos, query with a sidebar, services grid, services with video, team members, and more – nearly every kind of pattern that a business website might require.
Lemmony also packages five full-page patterns for services, gallery, contact, about, and the front page, making it easy to simply drop the pattern in place for the most common pages found on a brochure website.
This theme offers a solid user experience for those who are just getting started building their websites. After installing and activating Lemmony on a fresh site, it will look nearly exactly like the live demo. Everything on the front page is in place with placeholder content, including different menu items, just waiting for the user to add, remove, or edit the blocks. The user doesn’t have to start from scratch do any guesswork about where things go in the design. This is the kind of experience that all block themes should provide.
Lemmony comes with a companion plugin that includes additional customer blocks and other features, such as the custom icons seen in the demo. It will prompt the user after installing the theme to install the plugin as well to get more features. If the user is editing a page and inserts a pattern that includes icons, the theme will allow users to install the plugin directly from the editor. It’s a very smooth experience for including features that require an additional plugin. The plugin is optional and most of the designs seen in the demo work without it installed.
In the future, Lemmony’s creators plan to include more website templates, which would make it easier and faster to set up different kinds of sites. Overall, the theme feels snappy, has an unusually large variety of patterns, and is responsive and looks great on mobile. The installation experience is user-friendly and provides a good starting point for jumping into full-site editing. Check out the live demo and download Lemmony for free from the WordPress Themes Directory.
Automattic has published its Lettre theme to WordPress.org. The company launched its newsletter product at the end of December 2022 using Lettre as the default theme. The self-hosted version of this block theme is for those who want to publish a newsletter using Jetpack.
The theme puts the focus on the subscription form, which is the most important thing a newsletter landing page can do – make it easy for people to sign up. Beneath the form there is a link to read all the posts, followed by another subscription form. All of these elements in the home page design are blocks, making it easy for them to be removed or rearranged.
Lettre comes with 15 block patterns for building different pages and designs, including about the author(s), a bold color signup, a two-column signup, various designs for the newsletter intro with light and dark background images, newsletter signup with media on the left, newsletter signup with logos for the background, a list of posts, an in-post article promo, three columns of text, and more.
A live demo of the theme is available on WordPress.com. The menu items on the demo give a few examples of the different signup patterns in action.
Lettre is designed to be used with Jetpack’s Subscription block, which uses WordPress.com’s infrastructure to manage emails and subscribers. If you like the design but are already using another newsletter service, the Jetpack Subscribe block can be replaced with any other block, including the shortcode block for newsletter services that haven’t yet made their subscription forms available via a block. Be advised, you may need to write some custom CSS to ensure that the subscribe form matches the original design.
Lettre is one of the only themes in the WordPress Themes Directory that was made to be a newsletter landing page and certainly the only block theme dedicated to this purpose. Combined with Jetpack’s subscription feature, this is one of the most seamless ways to distribute a newsletter without all the extra steps of copying the content into a newsletter service’s editor. Lettre is available for free download from WordPress.org. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more themes like this pop up now that WordPress.com has launched its newsletter service.
Sensei LMS, Automattic’s teaching and learning management plugin, has released a new free block theme called Course. In February 2022, version 4.0 of the plugin introduced support for full-site editing with its bundled “Learning Mode” theme. Course features a new bold design made to be customized in the Site Editor.
Although Sensei works with neaerly any WordPress theme, the plugin looks its best with themes designed specifically for Sensei compatibility. Course includes styles for Sensei functionality to perfectly display course lists, sales pages, and the “Learning Mode” course templates. It integrates with the free Sensei LMS plugin as well as the pro version. Sensei’s new Course List block will also inherit all the theme’s styles seamlessly.
If green is not your jam, Course includes four style variations suitable as a starting point with blue, dark, and gold as the accent colors and multiple font combinations.
In addition to the various styles, Course brings all the power of the Site Editor for customizing for Sensei templates, as seen in the Lesson template below.
Although Course is ideal for website owners who are selling courses, the theme is also flexible to be used without Sensei for other purposes like blogging, coaching, and small businesses. Course isn’t easy to find if you’re hunting for block themes, as it doesn’t seem to be tagged as a block theme on WordPress.org. It’s free to download in the official Themes Directory or via the Sensei LMS website.
