So I had not planned to release another theme this year. Deejay was submitted to WordPress.org in December last year, and was only set live 6 months ago, and I didn’t think I would be able to release a second theme because of the review queue waiting times.
But when the Theme Review Team announced that they would give priority to seasonal themes like Christmas themes, I knew I could do a quick project for it and see what happens.
I love Christmas, and I had suggested to the other team leads in previous years that we should do something similar, but for different reasons it never happened until now.
-If you search for Christmas in the WordPress.org theme directory, only 3 themes will show up, so we need to change this so that the users can have a greater variety to choose from.
I first started making a child theme for my theme “White X-mas” during the contributor day at WordCamp Stockholm, and I had an idea of using candy, gingerbread and polka dots.
Because I had the opportunity to take a workshop on how to create custom Gutenberg blocks during the contributor day, I also wanted to add some simple custom blocks to my theme.
But I couldn’t get the theme “just right” and feedback from others who saw the theme during the day was not overwhelming either.
So after the WordCamp, I brought out a theme I have been working on from time to time since September. It is the theme used on this website.
I altered the colors, added the custom Gutenberg blocks and support for wide images and custom colors, and fixed a couple of more bugs for responsive views.
After that, most of time was actually spent reading Dashicon style guide and creating the custom icons in Illustrator. This was the most time consuming and difficult part of the theme, and that is why there is currently only 3 custom icons. ;P
Because this was a quick project, there is a to do list (There always is) 🙂
- Add WooCommerce support
- Add a page and post template suitable for the Gutenberg full width images
- Add alignment and alt tag for the custom Gutenberg blocks
- Swedish translation
- More icons