It’s been less than two weeks since my last block theme, Björk, was released, and here we are again with another one. This tells us two things:
- The Full Site Editing tools in WordPress have gotten a lot easier to work with.
- I’ve had a lot of nervous energy in the run-up to the Swedish elections, which were held a couple of days ago. The elections went poorly.
The resulting theme is called Beaumont. You can read more about the theme features here, check out the demo site, and download it for free from WordPress.org. You can also take a look at the Matt Report website, which started using the theme before it even went live on WordPress.org.
Since you’re (presumably) reading this on my blog, the theme will probably look familiar to you. A lot of people have asked me to release the theme I use on this site as a free theme, and due to boring technical reasons, I haven’t been able to. But the requests did push me to create a block theme inspired by the design.
Beaumont is designed for personal sites and blogs, with a special emphasis on longform content. The geometric sans serif typeface Albert Sans (also used in Björk) packs a punch in headings and other elements, and the post content is set in the highly readable serif typeface STIX Two Text.
A technical aside…
Currently, text will be set in Albert Sans when you edit your content in the Post Editor, despite it being set in STIX Two Text on the front-end. This is because WordPress currently doesn’t apply the core/post-content theme.json settings to the Post Editor preview. This should be fixed in WordPress 6.1, which is scheduled for November 1.
The theme also includes a handful a block patterns geared towards editorial design, seven different layouts for the blog archive page, and no less than ten different theme styles to start with. Creating theme styles has quickly become one of my favorite parts of building block themes. It’s fun to see how much the feeling of the theme can change by changing the color scheme and tweaking the typography.
The very best part is still when you get to see users put their own spin on themes in fun and unexpected ways.
Beaumont is named after the Stephen King character Thaddeus Beaumont from The Dark Half. The style variations in the theme are also named after Stephen King characters and locations. That includes the dark color scheme for Beaumont, which is named George Stark. That’s a The Dark Half meta joke for you.