Introducing Poe

I have a new WordPress theme out today! It’s called Poe, after horror author Edgar Allan Poe, and it’s a clean and minimal block theme built with portfolios and blogs in mind. You can…

Less than two weeks passed between the release of Poe and my previous block theme, Davis Blocks, but work on Poe actually started in October last year. I had just released Tove and started building Poe with Tove as the foundation, but as I wrote in my post about Davis Blocks, I wasn’t happy with how Tove was built. I could feel myself repeating the same mistakes with Poe, so I put it in a drawer until I could be bothered to do it properly.

After I completed Davis Blocks last week, I plucked Poe out of the drawer and rebuilt it completely, but this time with Davis Blocks as the scaffolding. Part of my goal with Davis Blocks was to give myself a small foundation that could be used for other block themes. I’m happy with the results. Poe isn’t as small as Davis Blocks, which is a much less ambitious theme, but with no JavaScript and less than 450 lines of CSS, it’s still pretty tiny by most measures.

Part of the larger footprint in Poe are the 30+ block patterns, which make it easier for users to quickly create complex site and page layouts. That includes seven different designs for the site header, and five for the footer. Poe also comes with ten different Global Styles variations – a feature introduced in WordPress 6.0 that allow you to change between different theme styles (colors, fonts, spacing) with the click of a button in the Global Styles panel. It’s really cool.


I hadn’t planned on releasing Poe quite this soon after Davis Blocks, but I’m going to spend almost a month straight in the Swedish mountains starting next week, so it was either now or in late August. Here’s to hoping no nasty bugs are discovered while I’m in a tent days away from a cell phone reception.