10 creative WordPress themes with real personality
Ten block themes I tested for personality without the performance hit, from the Afrofuturist Sankofa to the halftone lo-fi of Punk. Includes a CSS clip-path snippet for custom image shapes.
Tag: Block Styles
Alternatives to !important that keep the cascade intact
Cascade layers, the :is() pseudo-class and selector doubling all settle specificity conflicts without !important. Plus the few cases, like utility classes and accessibility overrides, where !important is still the right call.
WordPress.com plugins now come with every paid plan
WordPress.com opened plugins and Global Styles to every paid plan, starting at Personal. Here is what the lower tiers actually give you, and why SFTP, WP-CLI and staging still sit behind the Business plan.
April desktop wallpapers and the asset problem behind them
Smashing Magazine’s April 2026 wallpaper collection is out, calendars and all. I picked out a few, then got sidetracked by the asset side: dozens of resolutions per design, and how you would serve them in WordPress without hardcoding links.
Gutenberg 22.9: background gradients and EmptyState
Gutenberg 22.9 lands background.gradient support so a gradient and a background image can coexist, adds an EmptyState component to wordpress/ui, and gives the experimental Forms block hidden input fields.
Twenty Twenty-Seven development gets a lead mentor role
The Twenty Twenty-Seven core team added a Lead Mentor next to the usual dev leads. It reads like a soft change, but it is aimed at the contributor bottleneck that has been producing burnout and technical debt for years.
CSS shape function: wavy and blob shapes without SVG
The CSS shape function replaces the SVG and clip-path hacks used for wavy dividers and blob shapes. How the curve commands and control points work, and why a fixed command count is what lets the browser animate between two shapes.
Modern CSS features: native mixins and object-view-box
Native @mixin is under discussion, an SVG favicon can follow the user’s color scheme on its own, and object-view-box has been cropping images in Chrome since 2022. Notes on what each one replaces.
WordPress design trends 2026: less hand-coding, more prompting
A decade of explaining why WordPress sites don’t feel like apps, and what 2026 changes: blocks described to an AI instead of scaffolded by hand, the Interactivity API handling state without page reloads, and theme.json holding the design system.
Gutenberg 22.8: real-time collaboration and the connectors API
Gutenberg 22.8 adds collaborator selection highlighting and presence fixes to real-time collaboration, opens the Connectors registry API, and lets you style button hover and focus states in Global Styles. AVIF uploads and an admin bar Command Palette trigger come along too.