For WordPress.com sites

You must have a business plan at WordPress.com in order to install Baseline.

1. Download this file.
2. In the dashboard of your site go to Appearance > Themes.
3. If there is a button that says "Install new theme" click it. (The button is only there for business users.)
4. Choose the zip file you just downloaded, and Install Now.
5. The page "Installing theme from uploaded file" should appear. Clicking "Activate" will activate the theme.

For self-hosted sites

1. Download this file.
2. In the dashboard of your site go to Appearance > Themes.
3. Click the "Add Theme" button, then the "Upload Theme" button.
4. Choose the zip file you just downloaded, and Install Now.
5. The page "Installing theme from uploaded file" should appear. Clicking "Activate" will activate the theme.

The source code for the theme is available at GitHub.

We're trying out smaller post titles on the home page. These are now 25px, as opposed to 32px on the single post page. 

Block quotes are supported by WordLand, but didn't yet have a style.

This is now a block quote with a style.

And here is some text after the block quote.

My answers to the questions from May 4, 2025:

1. As I understand it, with a Business plan on wordpress.com you can install any third-party theme. 
2. Looking at the WordLand timeline, every post has a headline of author name and date, whether there is a title or not. That looks more balanced that simply having no headline for titleless posts.
3. I think that whether WordLand can add CSS to a site or a post depends on the WordPress.com REST API. At first glance I don't see anything about styles. On a self-hosted site it would be possible to extend the API to accept CSS (ChatGPT), but would WordLand to access that over wordpress.com?
4. OK
5. OK, we can try that
6. OK

Other problems I've noticed

1. Block quotes are not styled properly (they are indented, but no line to the left).
2. On the home page for untitled posts, there is no link to the story page for the post.
3. Bold italics were not working, but do now (fonts issue).
4. Inline code markup like this  isn't very distinguishable from normal text (issue on GitHub).

Here is a test post with an image 1600 pixels wide.

I've applied the single column layout proposed by Christy Nyiri. I personally think it looks fantastic. 

Here are some WordLand styles.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

This is a block quote. (This doesn't seem to be styled yet.)

Bold, italics, underlined (hmm, it's not underlined). 

An ordered shopping list:

1. Bread
2. Milk
3. Eggs

Notes as an unordered list:

•  The next/previous links have returned to the WordPress default instead of large arrows only. Update: That was my bug, now fixed.
• As Christy noted, the child elements of the Post Template block are a little weird at inheriting global padding, as evidenced on mobile.
• Are H1 and H2 way too big? Update I've bumped down the font-sizes of H1 to H3 to large, medium, and normal. H1 now matches the size of the post title, and H3 matches the size of normal paragraph text.

Here's a paragraph that appears under the unordered list.

This is a paragraph of text that comes above the list. These five random items were generated by AI.

1. Mango
2. Telescope
3. Jazz music
4. Notebook
5. Bicycle pump

And this is a paragraph to finish this list.

It looks like WordPress is putting 22 px top and bottom margin on the paragraphs and the ordered list, and 18 px top and bottom between the list items (actually the margin is on the p element within the li).

Here are the same items as an unordered list.

• Mango
• Telescope
• Jazz music
• Notebook
• Bicycle pump

And finally some text as a paragraph that appears below the list.

For Change #5, I once again used an add_filter function to replace the HTML generated by WordPress, this time for the next/prev links. The links show only an arrow at 1.5em (24 px), no underline, with the post title in the title attribute of the anchor tag so it shows up as a tool tip.

For Change #10, since we can include PHP code in the theme, we don't need to use JavaScript to filter out the Uncategorized category. We can use an add_filter function on the get_the_terms hook in functions.php to remove Uncategorized before the wp:post-terms block displays the categories.

The block also has a parameter for the prefix to the displayed list, so we changed it from "Posted in " to "Categories: ".

I thought Change #11 would be simple. The icons are in a social-links block, and an RSS feed is among the supported services.

However, adding

<!-- wp:social-link {"url":"#","service":"rss"} /--> 

to the sidebar failed. I had to dig into the WordPress code itself to find the service is named "feed", not "rss". The correct syntax for the RSS feed icon is

<!-- wp:social-link {"url":"#","service":"feed"} /-->.

🙄

Hooking up the correct link to the icon is a task for later.

Update: We put an add_filter function in functions.php to put the actual feed link on the icon (Commit 38b1a45).

For Change #4 some adjustments to the post body text were requested.

• Font size should be 18px
• Font weight should be 400
• Font color black on white background
• Values should be able to be changed in browser dev tools

In block style WordPress themes most of the CSS is in the theme.json file.

• The font size in a post is set in core WordPress to the CSS variable –wp–preset–font-size–normal. "normal" is set in WordPress itself to 16px, so I set "normal" in theme.json to 18px.
• I also increased the "small" font size from 16px to 18px. 
• Under "typography" I changed the font weight from 300 to 400.
• Also under "typography" the background was already set to white, so I left it.
• Yesterday I posted on how to view and change CSS variables in dev tools.  
• On my own, I also increased the size of "x-small" text from 14px to 16px, since the text in the sidebar and the footer seemed too small compared to the 18px post body text.

Once these changes are tested, they will become version 0.0.2 of the theme.