A little over three years after the last redesign of this site, this site finally has a fresh look. After several attempts and a long stretch of procrastination, I decided it was time for a change.
The site now runs on a new block theme, Ahwahnee, created to commemorate a memorable family visit last year to a small town near Yosemite National Park in Madera County, California.
Previous Layout
The previous design was based on the Khesara theme, a derivative of my earlier TT2 Gopher project. It featured a single-column, distraction-free layout for posts and pages, along with a Beaumont-inspired front page. While I still prefer that simple, distraction-free approach, it felt overdue to incorporate newer features, such as style variations, improved typography rendering, and updated patterns from TT3 through TT5, to create a fresh foundation.
New Layout
The new layout in Ahwahnee Blocks, is inspired by many innovative design by others and assembled over many interactions with the Twenty Twenty-Five base.
Front page
The main feature of the new front page is its split layout: single posts run full-width, while other content uses a post-with-sidebar structure. The goal is to give long-form reading room to breathe, while keeping lists of posts on the left and the additional categories related posts in the sidebar.
The design maintains the Version 2’s patterns-first approach, with a curated list of posts at the top and a wide closing quote section at the bottom.
Single posts and pages
The single post template now includes dynamically rendered template parts, a feature inspired by a discussion on the WordPress Developer Blog. A full-width layout is the default for pages, while single posts use a post-with-sidebar layout that includes a dynamically rendered list of related posts.
Style variations
Version 3 ships with a considerably wider set of style variations than Version 2, featuring seven color variations paired with seven typography variations, including the section color variations introduced in the Twenty Twenty-Five theme. Additionally, it includes TT5’s block style variations, such as template parts, subtitles, ledes, and callout blocks.
Patterns
The theme retains the patterns-first philosophy from Version 2. Page sections and front-page blocks are all pattern-driven, allowing the design to evolve through edits rather than template changes.
Things to do
Designing a theme is a never-ending process. Many features I wanted to include here were deferred, instead being developed in a separate base theme, Khesarabase, which I’ve been working on for some time.