It's been a while since we checked in here, so here's what's going on with the Baseline theme.

• v0.2.3 adds support for WordLand linkblogs. For posts in the 'linkblog' category, the link URL will be rendered as a link at the end of the post. A date headline appears above the posts for that day. The customizer includes an option to use the linkblog layout for the home page, for sites that consist entirely of linkblog posts. See https://links.daveverse.org for an example.
• v0.2.4 adds support for the feedland-blogroll plugin. If the plugin is installed, the home page will be rendered in two columns with the blogroll in the right column. See https://daveverse.org for an example.
• The RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress hasn't been updated in a while and wasn't working as expected. I wrote a simple RSSCloud External Ping plugin to add the cloud element to the RSS feed and ping rpc.rsscloud.io on new and updated posts. If it keeps working well I'll submit it to the wordpress.org plugin directory.

Upcoming changes will include:

• Now we create an artificial title for titleless posts. That is suboptimal when there are a lot of titleless posts. We need to offer an option to suppress the artificial titles, and perhaps show date headlines (like for linkblogs) instead. 
• The now theme has so many options it is becoming unwieldy to develop. We need to break it down so the options (linkblogs, blogrolls, etc.) are plugins or separate themes in order to streamline the basic Baseline theme.

I've published a minor update v0.1.5 to the Baseline theme. It now shows a minimum number of posts on the home page, even if you haven't written any posts in the past two months.

Now that linkblogs have been added as a feature to WordLand, we're thinking about how best to display them with the Baseline theme. I've put up a prototype of a linkblog in WordPress to experiment with the layout. (The prototype gets it's data by polling the RSS feed once an hour rather than from WordLand, but the basic idea is the same.)

I'm trying out a new logic for the home page. Instead of using infinite scroll to eventually show all posts, we're showing only the posts for the current and previous month, just like Scripting News. We don't link to anything older, since old news is no longer news, and good older posts will have links from elsewhere. 

There will be an option to show the traditional  WordPress pagination links to older posts for those who prefer that behavior.

We've just packaged v0.1.2 of the Baseline theme, which adds support for featured images (here's an example). The installation instructions are here.

Our next goal is to get the theme accepted into the WordPress.org theme directory. That will make it a lot easier to install on self-hosted sites, and and is a prerequisite to getting the theme approved for WordPress.com. 

While not strictly necessary for acceptance, in that process we'll be converting Baseline to a block theme. We want to be certain Baseline is compatible with future versions of WordPress, and a block theme will help ensure that.

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).

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.

Scott, a discussion on the support repo about whether we should have H4 in the popup menu led me to consider an option I had been thinking about in the background — letting the user configure the contents of that menu. It's basically a list of names, chosen from these:

bold, italic, underline, anchor, h1, h2, h3, quote, unorderedlist, orderedlist, pre, removeFormat, justifyLeft, justifyCenter, justifyRight, justifyFull, indent, outdent

They all seem to work. Special provisions need to be made in the baseline site for h1, h2, and h3, esp h3.

h3 should be the same font-size and line-height as a paragraph, but boldface. 

It's the best way to add a headline to writing in wordland. Imho any other size starts getting into MySpace territory.