Block based Themes are coming to WordPress sooner or later and we just published the first “beta” release of our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.

If you see yourself as an early adopter who likes to get his/her hands dirty feel free to generate a copy via the Theme Generator: https://them.es/starter-fse

The source code is licensed under GPLv2 and has been published on GitHub.

Full Site Editing is a collection of features that allow to fully customize a WordPress site via a new site editor. Overall the Full Site Editing experience using block based Themes looks promising and already works pretty well but you need to be aware that not all features are final and that bugs will appear during development.

Now a 100% (!) PageSpeed score is achievable with WordPress. Even on Mobile.

At the current state (WordPress version <5.9) this Starter Theme is not recommended for production sites. Please use it at your own risk and provide technical feedback to the Gutenberg team if possible!

One more thing: Block based features are still in development and have not yet been fully integrated in WordPress core. In order to enable the Site editor you need to install the Gutenberg Plugin on your site.

Update: In the meantime WordPress supports Block themes in Core and it’s safe to develop websites using the FSE Starter Theme.

Last year Github changed the name for newly created repositories: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories-is-now-main

To align with this change we’ve decided to rename all our existing Github repositories.

If you run a local master branch of any of our repositories you need to update your local branch to main:

• $ git branch -m master main
• $ git fetch origin
• $ git branch -u origin/main main

The Bootstrap Starter Theme has been updated to make use of Bootstrap 5 which has been released last week.

Changelog

• Bootstrap has been updated to the latest release v5.0.0
• jQuery is optional
• Support for older browsers has been dropped
• WordPress Coding Standard improvements
• Tested with WordPress v5.7

Download the Theme

Feel free to test out the new Starter Theme by downloading it using the Theme Generator:

them.es Starter is a Bootstrap 5 Starter Theme for WordPress.

Heads up: If you still want to develop with the legacy Bootstrap 4 build just select the old version in the Generator!

All sources can also be found on GitHub: https://github.com/them-es/themes-starter

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on the latest addition to our product line – a complete billing suite which integrates seamlessly into WordPress – and we’re happy to announce that the free version got approved and has been shipped to the WordPress Plugin directory.

🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻

Billy

If you are working as a Freelancer or are responsible for Accounting and Billing in a small agency and are looking for an easy-to-use, future-proof PbD* solution to create Invoices, Quotes and basic Accounting records, go on and give Billy a try.

*Privacy by Design: Billy posts are privately published, by default.

The plugin will work with any modern WordPress theme that supports the Block editor.

1. Install and Activate Billy on your WordPress website
2. Test it
3. Provide feedback
4. Submit a review ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Your valuable comments and suggestions are highly appreciated and will be examined by real people. Promised.

In the meantime we are getting the PRO add-on ready which will soon be is available for purchase here: https://them.es/plugins/billy

Billy Pro has some really cool extra features and integrates CRM tools which may speed up your billing processes rapidly.

• Contact management
• Address book
• Upcoming Birthdays widget for your contacts
• Enhanced Invoices, Quotes and Accounting
• Stats & charts
• GDPR compliant by implementing the WordPress Personal Data Exporter
• …and much more

Since the “Pro” version will be available as an add-on, installing the free Plugin from the WordPress directory is required in any case – so nothing is ever lost by checking Billy “Free” out.

Stay tuned!

Important notice: The Grunt config in our Starter Themes got replaced by gulp + webpack in the latest releases.

Gulp is quite similar to Grunt and allows to automate tasks like SASS > CSS compilation.

Webpack makes bundling of (Javascript) modules a breeze. The main advantage of bundling modules into a single file is that static assets get a smaller file size.

Including and bundling new Javascript modules is really easy and works out-of-the-box with the given configuration. A tutorial which explains how to include webpack modules to main.js can be found here: https://webpack.js.org/concepts/modules