Topic
Choosing, customising and replacing WordPress themes.
Block Themes
Global styles are the overrides you make in the Styles panel, saved to the database on top of theme.json. They travel with the site, not the theme, which is exactly why they vanish when you look for them after a theme change.
Block Themes
theme.json is one file that defines a block theme's entire design system: which controls editors get, and what those controls output as CSS. Fighting it with hand-written CSS usually means losing a specificity battle you didn't know you'd started.
Block Themes
A template part is a reusable chunk of a block theme, most often the header or footer, that multiple templates pull in. It replaces header.php and footer.php, and it edits like the rest of the site editor rather than like PHP.
Web Design
Both frameworks work in a WordPress theme, and both collide with the block editor in their own way. The deciding question is who writes the markup — you, or the person editing the page.
Plugins
The newer builders were designed by people who had watched the older ones age badly. They output cleaner markup and demand more of you — and they make exactly the same bargain about who owns your pages.
Themes
Enfold has been sold and updated for over a decade, which is genuinely rare. It also keeps your page content inside its own layout builder, and that is the fact the purchase should turn on.
Themes
Neve is one of the genuinely light multipurpose themes, and its free tier is unusually complete. The catch is that the starter sites arrive as builder content, and that is what you end up maintaining.
Themes
The bundled Twenty themes are reference implementations, not starter kits. Twenty Twenty-Two split the series into two eras, and knowing which era yours belongs to explains why the customiser is missing.
Themes
Hello is a near-empty theme designed to get out of Elementor's way. That is genuinely the right choice when Elementor builds the whole site, and the wrong one the moment it does not.
Themes
OceanWP gives away a capable theme and sells the extensions around it. Understanding that model — free core, paid modules, bundle pricing — is most of what you need to evaluate it.
Themes
Avada is a multipurpose theme with its own builder, sold as a complete website platform. It genuinely is one — which is the strength, the weight and the lock-in in a single sentence.
Themes
A marketplace is a shop, not a reviewed directory. The quality range is enormous, the licence is narrower than people assume, and the support window is shorter than the site's life.