What the Latest Core Releases Changed for Theme Authors
Section styles, better pattern registration, and a quieter but important change to how theme.json handles layout. What we had to update, and what we ignored.
Written by
Elizabeth Sramek
Elizabeth Sramek
Founder & lead designer
Elizabeth started ThemesCraft in 2012 as a one-person theme shop and has designed every theme the studio has released since. She writes about block themes, typography systems, and the unglamorous work of keeping a fourteen-year-old codebase healthy.
Reviewed by
Tomáš Holub
Tomáš Holub
Theme engineer
Tomáš joined the studio in 2017 and owns everything from theme.json architecture to the release pipeline. He maintains the studio's two plugins and runs the accessibility audits.
Last updated ·
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Two things in recent core releases meaningfully changed how we build: section-level style variations, and the tightening of layout handling in theme.json.
Section styles replaced a lot of custom CSS
Being able to define a named style for a group and its descendants removed roughly 8kb of hand-written overrides from our editorial themes.
What we ignored
Every new block-level setting is a temptation to expose it to editors. We still ship a deliberately small set of controls. The point of a theme is the decisions it has already made.