Fresh Theme

Fresh was written for blogs and online magazines: news and features presented in a scannable order, with enough structure on the front page to give several stories room at once. It sits on a fixed 900px canvas — the narrowest in the catalogue, chosen deliberately for reading — with a one- or two-column layout and more than ten collapsible block regions.

"Collapsible" is doing real work in that description. The regions disappear entirely when empty rather than leaving a gap in the grid, so an editor can turn a three-feature front page into a one-feature front page by unpublishing blocks, without anything reflowing wrongly. Getting that right is unfashionable, fiddly template work, and it is the difference between a theme that survives contact with a real editorial team and one that only looks correct filled with demo content.

Eight releases spread from April 2012 to May 2014, which alongside Simple Corporate makes it one of only two themes I kept releasing for a full two years. Magazine sites change their front page constantly, so they find the edge cases nobody else does.

It predates the responsive rebuild and never got one, and its test matrix — down to IE7 — shows what it was built against. Around 170 sites still report running it, most of them presumably content with a layout that has not needed to change.