Buzz

A typographic, journal/magazine Pollora theme, built in WordPress's Full Site Editing (block theme) mode: real templates/*.html and parts/*.html, editable in the Site Editor, instead of Pollora's usual Blade-based template hierarchy.

Use it

Buzz is one of the templates of pollora:make:theme:

php artisan pollora:make:theme my-journal   # then choose "Magazine"
# or, without the prompt
php artisan pollora:make:theme my-journal --repository=Pollora/theme-buzz

This repository is that template: its files carry %theme_name%, %theme_namespace%… which the command substitutes, so the pattern slugs (my-journal/masthead), the namespace (Theme\MyJournal) and the style.css header are the new theme's own. The design's vocabulary — the buzz-* classes, the buzz_card image size — keeps its name.

Why a block theme, in a Blade-first framework

Pollora normally resolves every page through its own Blade template hierarchy, and its guidance is explicit: never ship a WordPress PHP template. A genuine WordPress block theme is a deliberate exception to that — its templates/*.html and parts/*.html are what makes the WordPress Site Editor's page (colours, typography, the templates themselves) editable at all. Pollora's front controller falls through to WordPress core's own template resolution when nothing in its Blade hierarchy matches, which is what lets a real block theme render through it. Verified end to end (homepage, single post, page, archive, search, 404 — all with the correct HTTP status) before this theme was built.

Structure

buzz/
├── templates/           # Thin delegators: each just points at a pattern
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── archive.html
│   ├── search.html
│   ├── single.html
│   ├── page.html
│   └── 404.html
├── parts/                # header.html / footer.html, each delegating to a pattern too
├── patterns/              # Static patterns, registered by WordPress itself
│   ├── masthead.php       # The actual header markup
│   ├── index-list.php     # The journal index: a post loop, large titles, hairline rules
│   ├── article.php        # A single post's body, plus comments
│   ├── page-body.php      # A plain page's body
│   ├── not-found.php      # The 404 message
│   └── design-system.php  # Every native block, styled — offered in the inserter
├── resources/views/patterns/
│   └── colophon.blade.php # The footer — Blade, for the one thing that needs real PHP: the year
├── theme.json             # The design system: palette, the two-family type scale, spacing, styles
├── resources/assets/
│   ├── css/app.css        # @theme static tokens (colour only — see below) + the few hand-authored rules
│   └── fonts/              # Self-hosted Playfair Display + Source Serif 4 (OFL, Google Fonts, latin subset)
└── app/Providers/AssetServiceProvider.php

One rule decides where a file goes: the theme root holds what WordPress reads itself (templates/, parts/, patterns/, theme.json, style.css — the layout the Site Editor exports too), and resources/views/ holds Blade, compiled by Pollora.

So a static pattern is a native WordPress one, patterns/*.php: block markup under a header docblock (Title, Slug, Categories…). Most of Buzz's patterns are, since the dynamic blocks (post-title, post-content, post-terms…) do the work themselves. A pattern that needs Laravel — the colophon's year, here — is a Blade view in resources/views/patterns/*.blade.php, registered by Pollora.

WordPress caches the list of a theme's patterns/ files: a new file shows up once that cache is cleared (wp eval 'wp_get_theme()->delete_pattern_cache();'), or at once with WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE=theme.

Design system

One committed editorial direction — ink on newsprint, one accent used sparingly:

• Palette: paper (warm off-white), ink (near-black), caption (muted grey), rule (hairline), rubric (a restrained editorial red — kickers, the masthead rule, a link on hover; never a colour field).
• Type: Playfair Display (display — high-contrast, the classic magazine masthead serif) + Source Serif 4 (body/UI text) — a two-family discipline, no third face. A magazine-scale, fluid type ladder (caption → masthead) is hand-authored in theme.json, not Tailwind's defaults.
• Rhythm: a narrow reading column (contentSize: 42rem), drop caps on, a journal index list with large serif titles and hairline dividers instead of cards.

Only the colour palette flows from Tailwind's @theme static block into the built theme.json (disableTailwindFonts / FontSizes / BorderRadius in vite.config.js) — the type scale, the two font families (each with its own fontFace) and the border radii (none — a sharp, print-like edge everywhere) are the design system itself, authored by hand.

Local development

Develop on a theme generated from this template, never in this repository — its placeholders do not run:

php artisan pollora:make:theme buzz --repository=Pollora/theme-buzz   # in a test project
cd themes/buzz && npm install && npm run dev
# … then package the changes back into this repository:
./bin/package-theme.sh /path/to/project/themes/buzz
git diff   # review: only buzz/, Theme\Buzz and the style.css header become placeholders

The build's output folder is named after the theme's directory on disk, so build from where WordPress serves the theme (themes/<slug>), not from a symlink: Node resolves __dirname to the real path, and a mismatch breaks every asset and font URL silently.

bin/ is dropped by the scaffolder. It holds the packaging script, bin/ci/install.php (the commit under test, substituted as make:theme would — what CI installs) and the browser tests.

Status

A first, deliberately simple version: six templates, six patterns, no style variations. See Pollora/framework for the FSE support this theme relies on, and the framework's changelog for the two fixes this theme's construction found and fixed (a block theme's 404.html answering the right HTTP status, its error404 body class).