Keeping the tradition of switching themes every three years, I decided to activate a new theme on my site a few hours ago.
I wrote about the process of developing the previous theme with the Odin Framework as a theme starter on this post from 2016.
Choosing the theme
This time I thought it would be better to not develop my own theme and decided to pick one with full support for the new Block Editor included in WordPress version 5.0 launched in December 2018. The new editor has been developed and tested for the last two years as a plugin called Gutenberg.
As I’ve been using the plugin Stackable – Gutenberg Blocks since last year, I decided to use the theme created by the same people who develop the plugin in question.
Since the Stackable theme is available on the official theme repo on WordPress.org, you can install it directly from your WP-Admin dashboard.
Setting up the site
Since I was an early adopter of the new editor, the process of setting up the new theme on my site was easy and almost everything worked like a charm.
I had to focus on two issues only: Widgets and Homepage. The last one was completely revamped with blocks (which will help me a lot when editing it again in the future).
When switching themes, all widgets are disabled automatically when WordPress can’t find a new widget area using the same name of the previous one. In this case, I just had to go to Appearance > Widgets to move all required widgets from Inactive Widgets to their new positions.
The homepage was a little harder and it was necessary to invest almost an hour working on it. I believe it looks amazing now with the following blocks:
- Header (Stackable).
- Posts (Stackable).
- Separator (Stackable).
- Button (one included in WordPress and another one by Stackable).
- Media & Text.
I think I’m ready to stick to this theme for the next three years now 😛