Twelve WordPress themes ranked by actual WordPress.com usage share in 2026, with notes on block architecture and performance, plus the enqueue trick that keeps block CSS off pages that do not need it.
Gutenberg 22.4 merged 402 pull requests. The ones worth your time: pattern overrides for any block attribute that supports block bindings, and font library access for classic and hybrid themes.
A honeycomb layout that keeps its geometry without floats, magic numbers or a JavaScript grid calculator. corner-shape handles the bevel, cos(30deg) sets the aspect ratio, and sibling-index() works out which rows need the half-item shift.
Site Editor changes live in the database, not in your theme files. This is the setup I use to pull those visual edits back into version control: WordPress Playground, the Create Block Theme plugin and a GitHub repo as the source of truth.
Matching a 1440px Figma file coordinate for coordinate produces CSS full of magic numbers that breaks on the first foldable phone or bumped font size. What to agree on with designers instead: tokens, fluid units, and rules about behavior.
The 2025 Web Almanac covers 17.2 million sites. Variable fonts and text-wrap are finally common, but median mobile page weight is up 202.8% since 2015 and two thirds of sites strip their focus outlines.
The code block was a glorified textarea until WordPress.com rebuilt it. Native highlighting for over 100 languages, copy buttons and line numbers in the sidebar, and syntax token colors you can set from theme.json instead of loading Prism.js on every page.
Notes from the Web Directions Dev Summit in Sydney, where the argument was that CSS scroll-driven animations make most JS scroll libraries pointless. Includes the CSS, and why prefers-reduced-motion is not optional.
Chrome 144 and Firefox 147 moved anchor positioning and @scope to Baseline, so tooltips and style isolation no longer need a JS library. Also here: the Temporal API in Chrome, the dead HTML document outline, and using your OS as a CMS.
Hand-calculated HEX palettes break the moment a base color changes. This walks through CSS Relative Colour and OKLCH in WordPress themes, and how @property lets you animate one channel at a time.