Simple Corporate

Simple Corporate has more block regions than anything else I published: sixteen, eight of which sit in the footer. That was not a feature so much as a response to what site builders kept asking for. A business site's footer is where the sitemap, the contact block, the certifications, the payment logos and the small print all end up, and every region I did not provide became an issue asking for one.

The rest is deliberately plain: a fixed 1000px canvas, one-, two- or three-column layouts, two prepared colour schemes in white and dark, HTML5 structural markup, and no dependency on a core base theme. It is the widest fixed layout in the set, which was a considered bet in 2012 that 1024px screens had finally stopped mattering.

Eight releases spread from April 2012 to May 2014 — the longest span of any theme here, by some distance. Most themes get a burst of releases and then go quiet; this one kept receiving small fixes for two years because it was the theme agencies picked when they needed regions to put things in, and agencies file better bug reports than anyone.

The region count is also the clearest example of a trade-off I now think about constantly. Every configurable slot you expose is a promise: it has to keep working, keep its name, and keep its position through every future release, because somebody has content in it. Extensibility is not free; it is a commitment you make on behalf of your future self.