Wei Theme

A New Block Theme

Introducing Wei. Tell your story and share your thoughts with a minimal WordPress block theme, inspired by pure simplicity.

Embracing clean type, beautifully bold color schemes, and color-matched featured images, Wei puts your words first — in a delightful and creative fashion. 

Wei is a stripped down, minimalistic block theme with a single column layout. It gives a lot, and asks for little in return.

Dynamic accent colors

Much like Wabi, the first WordPress block theme I released, Wei supports color schemes for each post. That means you can set an entire vibe for a post, with a single click.

Each post can have one of four different color schemes, all of which you may personalize within the Global Styles interface. 

Seamless cover images

Not only does the color scheme get applied to a post, but the featured images also inherit the color scheme’s duotone effect, blending them seamlessly into the background of the page. It wasn’t particularly easy to figure out, but the result is as simple as it is creative—right where I like to sit. Just add a featured image—Wei takes care of the rest.

Showcasing the featured Cover block image in the Wei Block Theme by Rich Tabor
Seamless featured images, as seen in Wei

Behind-the-scenes, the single.html template is using a Cover block that leverages the post’s featured image. Then the duotone is applied by the color scheme assigned to the post. This way, just about any image will look fine.

Style variations

On top of personalization on a post-by-post basis, Wei has four different style variations that allow you to change the look and feel of your entire site in an instant. Here’s a post, with each style variant and each color scheme applied to it:

Style variations in the Wei Block Theme by Rich Tabor
Style variations from top to bottom: Default, Cloud, Hyper & Onyx

By abstracting design from content, WordPress has provided a method for styling a site with a click or two — wild. And I’ve said this plenty of times now, but style variations are absolutely a game changer for block themes WordPress.

Full Site Editing

Wei takes full advantage of the latest WordPress technologies and improvements, including wholesale support for Full Site Editing and Global Styles.

You see, everything in Wei is a block. So you can swap out headers, footers, add different theme blocks to the templates, or change a template layout entirely.

Alternate footer parts in the Wei Block Theme by Rich Tabor
Choosing a different footer part in Wei.

To edit a block template, or part (i.e. header and footer), open Templates from the WordPress > Appearance > Editor menu item and start personalizing.

Get Wei today

Wei came to fruition as an idea on my flight back from WordCamp Europe. I wanted to make a block theme that was fun, colorful, and overall “friendly” to use.

Full Site Editing — and this whole new era of WordPress in general — can be a challenging transition from the traditional WordPress experience. Wei, and Wabi for that matter, are my bits to help that transition, by providing a delightful canvas to showcase FSE and blocks in a creative light.

You may download Wei from the WordPress Themes Directory today, 100% free and licensed under the GPL. If you like the theme, I’d love to hear it — please do reach out on Twitter, and consider leaving a review. Enjoy!

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