Barebone Block Themes

lightweight starter block theme, starter fse theme, lightweight block theme, minimalistic block full site editing theme.

The Bible of Block Theme Building: Block Theme Building Tips is essential reading. Think of it as the “bible” of the industry, providing a thorough understanding of the new role themes play.

With the advent of block themes, the landscape has changed:

• CSS is minimal,
• patterns reign supreme over templates and
• everything is configured in the theme.json file.

Quick tip: Why theme.json instead of style.css? Because JSON is a machine-readable format so it can be integrated into Editor UI.

Here I am listing the themes to start a project with, which follow the latest things that appear in Gutenberg, but that are not overloaded. I will further develop the design based on this theme. The theme should be very basic with the minimum elements that must exist in the theme.

Current selection is “Block Canvas” Theme plus plugin “Create Block Theme” for fonts. Alternative is Greenshift or

Theme: Greenshift

Greenshift is a newly-released companion theme for the Greenshift plugin. It is a technical upgrade from Blockpress and you can watch a detailed features overview in this video.

According to a detailed explanation provided in an original Facebook post, there are some notable specifics compared to Blockpress:

• Greenshift is built on the foundations of latest WordPress 6.1 functions
• Features an improved global color system,
• Uses patterns as templates, rather than template variants like Blockpress
• The Greenshift theme uses font loader from the Greenshift plugin and when you add a font to the plugin, it will also be available in the theme.

Overall, choosing this theme is a no-brainer decision due to its advanced features and integration with the Greenshift plugin.

Theme: Block Canvas

Themes/block-canvas is the new recommended canonical block theme, according to the official Automattic Theme Team. It’s a simple theme that supports full-site editing and has all the necessary elements with enough examples.

To install, the best approach is to copy-paste:

cd /wp-content/themes/
wget https://github.com/Automattic/themes/archive/trunk.zip
unzip trunk.zip "themes-trunk/block-canvas/*" -d tmp-folder
mv tmp-folder/themes-trunk/block-canvas/ block-canvas/
rm -r tmp-folder
rm -f trunk.zip

Plugin: Create Block Theme

Create Block Theme is the official plugin hosted on WordPress/create-block-theme. It does two simple but very important things - creating a cloned theme from current theme snapshot and incorporate Google Fonts into any block theme.

Plugin deals with fonts and bundles fonts with your theme with only a few clicks, as explained in official document on how to add fonts. The plugin downloads the fonts into the theme’s assets/fonts/ folder and adds font family definitions to theme.json. Here is the video tutorial on the same operation.

While the plugin offers the rarely used ability of generating a completely new theme, it’s not advisable to use it as the result is far too stripped down, lacking anything beyond an empty header and footer.

Theme: Frost by WP Engine

The latest and greatest, rich in features and design, Frost is the theme by WP Engine found at the repository wpengine/frost.

There are numerous resources for learning about Frost, such as on font sizing, spacing presets, on Google fonts and self-hosting them.

One specific thing you can learn from this theme is its support for composer linting coding standards.

Čak postoji i generator Frost Started Theme Generator koji will take the latest Frost source code and replace all instances of the words “frost” and other theme information in order to get a new, ready-to-use started theme.

Theme: Blockpress is Not Barebone Enough

Blockpress is a very modern design block theme. It suggests installing the Greenshift plugin and that’s understandable when you know the background story.

The original authors of this theme are Greenshit authors, but they handed over development to others so they could focus on the plugin. Apparently they made the first release of Blockpress, but the wp.org review was so complicated that they decided to give the rights to another developer, who continues to develop the theme. Greenshift author claims that this person working on the Blockpress theme is his friend and that he will therefore keep maximum compatibility with the theme in the future. This all is written in this support thread.

According to Greenshift author and also in my opinion, WordPress is moving towards the “block paradigm” and the theme will only set the look of system elements like forms and buttons, all other things will be made with plugins.

I don’t like that Blockpress seems to use blocks from the free Material Design for WordPress collection of blocks, besides Greenshift blocks, but I’m not sure in this.

I have mixed feelings about Blockpress seemingly incorporating blocks from the free Material Design for WordPress collection, in addition to Greenshift blocks. However, I’m uncertain about this.

Theme: “Blockbase” is Depreciated

The future of the Blockbase theme is certain that no significant changes are planned. It was one of the important official themes developed by the official Automattic Theme Team, who publish on the ThemeShaper blog and develop themes on the Automattic/themes repository.

It was a “Universal” theme that served as a transition solution from Classic to fully Block themes, and you can read more about it in the article The Future Of Universal Themes.

Team now recommends using only the “Block Canvas” theme as a parent or cloning it with the help of the “Create Block Theme” plugin.

Based on numerous texts, such as Create A Blockbase Child Theme, it’s clear that the experiences with this theme have been transferred to the “Create Block Theme” plugin and the “Block Canvas” theme, and that this is the direction being taken.

Theme: Experimental “Empty Theme” Offers Nothing

The WordPress/theme-experiments repository is also an official one, but it is explicitly stated that it is not for production. It is, in fact, an experimental repository filled with peculiar and unnecessary tools. However, it does house the “Empty Theme” and a corresponding php new-empty-theme.php theme generator script, which merely duplicates the “Empty Theme”. Read more in article from 2020.

If you’re curious and would like to try out the generator script, follow these steps:

cd /wp-content/themes/ 
git clone https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments.git
cd theme-experiments
php new-empty-theme.php
mv my-theme-name ..
cd ..
rm -rf theme-experiments/

Please note that this process creates a rudimentary and meaningless theme, which is simply a duplicate of the “Empty Theme”. There’s no compelling reason to use this, as even the empty “Create Block Theme” is a more comprehensive alternative. Actualy, “Empty Theme” is defined as the minimum boilerplate code for a block-based theme.

Theme: “Blank” Canvas is not “Block Canvas”

Blank Canvas is a streamlined theme perfect for single-page websites, known for its simplicity. Actually, I only mention it so as to avoid confusion with “Block Canvas,” which has a much greater significance.

Extraordinary Block Themes

Brian Gardner, the Frost author at WP Engine, has several highly current personal themes that are great learning resource. Check out bgardner/powder or Bright Mode, which I think is origin of the Frost theme. Take a look at any of his other themes.

Wabi is a theme designed by the highly regarded author Rich Tabor. In terms of appearance, it’s not particularly standout, but technically it’s excellent as it leverages the latest block capabilities. There’s even a decent tutorial available here.

Modern Themes by Anders Norén are all excellent as a learning resource. Among the recently released and therefore the most current are andersnoren/poe and andersnoren/oaknut.

Blockify, the beautifully designed theme with a modern look, comes with a companion plugin of the same name. The plugin is said to work seamlessly with any block theme. As it heavily utilizes the render_block hook to modify core blocks, Blockify can be a valuable source of code concept ideas.

Block Themes Of Average Quality

• WordPress/twentytwentythree: Twenty Twenty-Three is the default WordPress theme which of course applies all the latest block technologies. Best in pair with the Twentig plugin.

• Gesso by Block Styles is ok but isn’t special in any way.

• UniBlock theme is of unknown origin as I don’t know where I heard about it, but I already don’t like it as it is very sales-oriented. From a technical standpoint, its code is well-written and makes use of the latest block capabilities.

Other Minimalistic Themes

Themes that are not necessarily block themes and that I don’t plan to use, but I mention them anyway as I’ve tried them all.

Breakdance Zero Theme: soflyy/breakdance-zero-theme is a theme by the author of Oxygen and Breakdance, and this theme is adapted for Breakdance and doesn’t work without it

Material Design by Google is a theme that is not modern block theme.

Blocksy, is widely and also by Greenshift author considered to be the best “Classic” theme, and I concur that it is solid. However, as it is not an “Block” theme, let’s move on from it.

Plugin: Twentig as addition Twenty Twenty-Three Theme

Twentig is a really free plugin toolkit that enhances block themes. Use the official Twentig site for documentation on how to use Twentig. To make the most of it, using the “Twenty Twenty-Three” theme is suggested, or any other proper block theme.

The most important features you get with Twentig are:

• Enhances some core blocks with some awesome features
• Adds “responsive visibility” options to all core blocks
• There’s a beautiful “Stretch link” option to make the block entirely clickable if it contains a link somewhere inside. Currently, it works only on core/cover, core/media-text and core/column. This article explains it better.
• Enhances core/navigation block with responsive breakpoint and some other features
• Beautiful UI of the idea for “Predefined CSS Classes”. Take a look at how to add CSS classes. Sad that it’s a fixed list of styles that can’t be modified.
• Adds the possibility to host Google Fonts locally
• Comes with a huge library of pre-designed block patterns and page templates, nicely grouped by categories, made just out of core blocks

Scaffolding.io

Neki stari “responsive framework” for WordPress scaffolding.io i repo crosspeaksoftware/scaffolding: Responsive Design Scaffolding for WordPress. Prestalo sa razvojem u 2021 i koristi Bootstrap Grid, SASS, Gulp as task runners, etc. Nisam zadivljen ali pomeni ga

Spectra One

Najnovija tema, krajem marta 2023, je odlična, baš odlična clean tema Spectra One. Nakon Frost-a, na prvi pogled, ova tema je tu negde - možda je i bolja pošto izgleda ima više patterna included. Ovo ozbiljno razmotri.

Odličan starter theme The Lightning-fast WordPress Starter Theme for Developers - Flynt sa repo ja flyntwp/flynt: Component based WordPress starter theme, powered by ACF Pro and Timber, optimized for a11y and fast page load results. sa Components - Flynt, ali je sve razvijeno sa ACF Pro. Flynt is a lightning-fast WordPress Starter Theme for component-based development with ACF Pro.