April 14, 2023 Feature Roundup
Current Theme Version: 5.20.74
Current Blocks Version: 4.7.13
All about the blog.
It’s been awhile since we revisited single blog posts. The jump to the block editor was a giant paradigm shift and opened many new possibilities for layout of blog posts.
But at the same time, there is a reason that blog posts and pages are treated as distinct entities. Blog posts, by nature, should be text based and design should be minimal. Just because you have all the power of blocks at your fingertips doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it.
Inspiration
We looked to some major news outlets and blogging platforms to see how people we writing long form digital content. While we were careful not to take away flexibility, we wanted users to be able to craft a blog experience that let their copy shine.
We came up with a few new options under Customizer → Blog → Post Pages. More importantly, we’ve created a framework to expand on these options and layouts in the future.
When Post Styles is enabled, you’ll see the brand new options available: Text Size, Gray Background, Top Border, and Font.
Using these new features, you can craft your reading experience to not only make your blog posts more legible, but also remove distractions and let your readers read.
A new framework for blog post layouts.
Previously, we gave users the options to use a sidebar either on the left or right side of their blog posts. We’ve expanded this into a full-fledged layout switch.
While the sidebar options remain unchanged, we’ve added a new Columns option and plan on expanding this in the future. The default sidebar with widgets is a little finicky, and we want to curate these options more tightly with options that look good as soon as you pick them.
When combined with the Post Styles, we think you can make some truly beautiful blog posts.
Never miss an <h1> tag again on your blog posts.
We’ve added some code that will parse your blog post to make sure that you’ve included an <h1> tag somewhere in the body if you have the blog post title set to be hidden. If we don’t find one, we’ll automatically add a visually hidden <h1> post at the top of your blog so you don’t get dinged for SEO.