Time flies, doesn’t it? It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I updated all of my themes to remove the Google Fonts connection. Turns out it was over four years ago. WordPress.org adds a notice to themes that haven’t been updated in two years and hides them from search results, so most of my themes – including my block themes – had disappeared from view. I spent the past couple of days doing something about it.
All 33 of my free WordPress themes are now tested with WordPress 7.1, the latest release. The updates go beyond bumping the “Tested up to” value in the readme files, though. I used Claude to do a health check on every single one, and fixed issues big and small along the way. Jetpack infinite scroll and editor styles work again in many of the classic themes, menus work better with keyboards and screen readers, outdated jQuery and slideshow code has been replaced, and smaller font files save hundreds of kilobytes. A handful of long-standing bugs are gone too.
Updating 33 themes with Claude
This is the first time I’ve used Claude to update my old themes, so I was curious about what the experience would be like. I assumed it would catch things that I would otherwise miss, but I was also worried that it would make mistakes along the way. Most importantly, I wondered how much time I would save.
I worked through the themes with Claude one at a time, in a local WordPress install. For each theme, Claude updated the version numbers and the “Tested up to” value, looked for deprecated code and anything that no longer meets the WordPress.org theme requirements, ran Theme Check, and tested the theme in WordPress. Then it stopped and waited for me. I reviewed the changes on the front end, in the editor and in the code itself, tried everything out myself, and only after I’d approved them did it commit the update and build the zip for upload.
Claude was great at the tedious parts. It tracked down deprecated jQuery across a dozen themes, subset and converted the fonts, and found bugs I’d forgotten about or never noticed, like the Jetpack infinite scroll issue that had been quietly breaking eight classic themes with a specific pagination setting for years. It didn’t get everything right on the first try, though.
- In Tove, the new variable version of DM Sans didn’t show in my testing, because the Global Styles in my database pointed to the old font files that Claude had deleted. We kept the old files so existing sites won’t break.
- In Hamilton, a
.DS_Storefile ended up in the zip that Claude generated, which blocked it from being uploaded to the theme directory. - In Iwata, it noticed that the screenshot included a photo without a listed license, but the replacement it suggested had a license that isn’t GPL-compatible, even though it had access to the theme requirements.
Nothing big, considering the number of themes and changes we worked through. All in all, it took two days, compared with the weeks I would have needed to go through 33 themes this thoroughly on my own. Without Claude, it’s unlikely that I would have updated my classic themes at all.
The updates in numbers
Here’s Claude’s summary of the updates, with some fun numbers:
- Almost 1,000 releases between them. Counting every changelog entry, the 33 themes have had 991 releases.
- All tested up to WordPress 7.1. Ten themes were last marked as tested with WordPress 6.0, so they skipped eleven major WordPress versions in one go.
- Longest wait: more than four years. Eight themes hadn’t been updated since summer 2022: Hamilton, Hitchcock, Hoffman, Iwata, Lingonberry, McLuhan, Rams and Rowling. Next longest were Hemingway (late 2022), Wilson (March 2023), Garfunkel (May 2023) and Davis (August 2023).
- Shortest wait: under four weeks. Sullivan was last updated on October 8.
- Oldest theme updated: Lingonberry, first released in July 2013. It’s now 13 years old, and its slideshow library went from FlexSlider 2.1 to 2.7. Lovecraft (January 2014) and Hemingway (also January 2014) come next. The youngest is Spiekermann, from January 2025.
- Five themes reached 1.0.0: Björk, Beaumont, Davis Blocks, Poe and Tove. Tove had been in 0.x for five years.
- About 8,700 lines added and 7,100 removed.
- About 2.1 MB of font files removed and 1.2 MB added. Ten themes now use variable fonts, and several had fonts converted to WOFF2 or trimmed to the characters they actually use. The biggest savings:
- One Jetpack bug fixed in eight themes. Infinite scroll was pushing page header code into the post list. Fixed in Fukasawa, Garfunkel, Hamilton, Hitchcock, Hoffman, Iwata, Lovecraft and Rams.
- Six menu and search toggles turned into real buttons in McLuhan, Rowling, Sullivan and Wilson. They now work with a keyboard and tell screen readers whether they’re open. Sullivan’s dropdown menus also open with the keyboard now, and Koji returns focus to the search toggle when the search closes.
- Deprecated jQuery removed throughout the classic themes. Old shorthand calls like
.click(),.resize()and.bind()were replaced with.on()and.trigger(). - Also updated: Baskerville, Eksell, Hideo, Norrsken, Oaknut, Pulitzer, Radcliffe and Vermeer.