Introducing Oaknut

WordPress 6.1 was released a couple of days ago, and I have a new free block theme ready in celebration. It’s called Oaknut, and it’s designed to help you create profile pages with outgoing links. It’s inspired by the Linktree service. (See what I did with the name?)

You can read more about the theme features in Oaknut here, check out the demo on wp-themes.com, and take it for a spin by downloading it for free from WordPress.org.

Oaknut is extremely limited in scope, including only three template files:

  • Home, for the front page.
  • Index, for everything else.
  • 404, for when there isn’t anything else.

Since the theme is designed for sites with one page only, I wanted that page to be as flexible as possible. Oaknut includes 23 different style variations, 14 different font families (3 system fonts, the rest variable fonts stored locally), eight different button styles, and five different styles for social links.

Throw all of those elements in a pot and stir, and you can come up with some pretty fun designs.

By requiring WordPress 6.1, Oaknut can use a bunch of new block theme features introduced in the latest version of WordPress. Features such as:

  • Fluid typography
  • Spacing sizes
  • Root padding aware elements
  • Pseudo selector styles in theme.json
  • Theme.json styling of new elements like button, caption and heading

This enables Oaknut to have a really small CSS file. It comes in at less than 150 lines, and 120 of those lines are for the custom block styles included in the theme. Combine that with locally hosted variable fonts and the complete lack of JavaScript in the theme, and you end up with some pretty speedy profile pages.

Oaknut isn’t designed for complex sites with multiple pages and blogs, but since it is a block theme, it can be used for that as well.

Users can add their own custom templates for views like ”Single”, ”Page”, ”Archive” and ”Search” through the Site Editor. Go to Appearance → Editor → Templates, and click the ”Add New” button in the top right. Any templates not included in the theme can be added here.


That’s Oaknut. I hope you like it! If you build something fun with it, send me a tweet and let me know.