Testing the WordLand Baseline Theme
Author: shanson

This is a post with a featured image. We've just added support for featured images, and we're putting it at the top of the post constrained to the width of the post body.

A test post never comes alone. They generally come in twos or threes or even as a crowd!

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).
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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: ".

Last update: 7/26/26; 11:30:29 AM.