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Barebone Block Themes

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Barebone Block Themes

Lightweight Starter Block Theme, Starter FSE Theme, Lightweight Block Theme, Minimalistic block Full Site Editing theme.

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.

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.

| My pick is plugin Create Block Theme |

Notable Barebone Themes

  • Blockify is a theme of this barebone type, basic and modern and looks very nice

Theme: Blockpress

Blockpress is an extremely beautiful FSE theme with a very modern design. Right after activation, it suggests installing the Greenshift plugin, and that’s understandable when you know the background story.

The original author of this theme is also the Greenshit author, but they handed it over to others so they could focus on the plugin. They say they made the first release of Blockpress, but the wp.org review was so complicated that they decided to give the rights of the theme to another developer, who continues to develop the theme. Also, the 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, maximum integration, and that he is recommending the theme.

This is all written in this support thread.

It also mentions the positive fact that Blockpress is free and will remain free.

In my opinion, and according to him, 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.

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

Theme: Greenshift

Greenshift is an official companion FSE theme for the Greenshift plugin that has recently been unexpectedly released.

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

  • Greenshift is more modern and built on the foundations of WordPress 6.1 functions
  • It also features an enhanced system for global colors,
  • 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. It prioritizes the use of variable fonts, eg Mona Sans.

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

Plugin: Create Block Theme

Create Block Theme is the official WordPress.org plugin hosted on WordPress/create-block-theme. This really great plugin also has the ability to quickly generate a child theme with the absolute minimum content needed.

It also deals with fonts and makes it possible to bundle fonts with your theme with only a few clicks, as explained in How to add fonts to block themes. The plugin stores the font assets in a sub-folder of your theme /assets/fonts/ and adds font family definitions to your theme.json

Blockbase is the core Automattic theme, featuring a set of minimal templates and design settings. Based on this text Create A Blockbase Child Theme, I can conclude and I’m even certain that this is the original theme from which the plugin creates new themes. From article is evident that the plugin name has been changed from create-blockbase-theme to create-block-theme.

Block Canvas Theme

The themes/block-canvas theme by Automattic Theme Team is a simple theme that supports full-site editing. It is part of a larger Git repository, so it may seem a bit strange to install, but it isn’t complicated as I have provided commands for copy-pasting.

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/ weddyplace-block-canvas/
rm -r tmp-folder
rm -f trunk.zip

After analyzing and testing, I have found that the Blank Canvas theme is extremely basic and that it would be better to use the “Create Block Theme” plugin instead. You can read about this theme here: Automattic Launches the Blank Canvas Theme

Empty Theme from WordPress/theme-experiments

This is an official experimental repository that has an “Empty Theme” and a corresponding FSE Theme Generator PHP script. Even though it’s been around for a while, it still seems to be well-maintained and updated. You can read more about it in an article from 2020 here: Jump Start Block-Based Theme Development With the FSE Theme Generator

To use it, you can run these commands:

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/

This process creates the smallest possible barebone theme, with nothing but the basics, so I’m moving this into the document of barebone skeleton themes. I’m convinced now that to get this kind of result, it’s much more logical and easier to use the previously mentioned official “Create Block Theme” plugin.

Block Themes Of Average Quality

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 Google is a theme that I assumed were Block themes, but it turned out not to be

  • Blocksy mnogi (Greenshift autor) smatraju najboljom klasičnom temom, a i ja mislim da je solidna. Međutim, pošto nije FSE tema, zaboravi na nju.

date 10. Nov 2022 | modified 27. Jan 2023
filename: Wordpress » Gutenberg » Themes » Lightweight Barebone Starter
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