Diffyweb Base Theme

Minimal Full Site Editing (FSE) starter theme for WordPress 6.8+. Pure block theme — no classic PHP templates, no build step. Fork it, tune theme.json, ship.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.8+
• PHP 7.4+

Install

Upload the theme directory to wp-content/themes/ and activate in Appearance → Themes.

What's included

Templates: front-page, home, archive, single, page, index, plus a page-style-guide custom template you can assign to any page to preview every core block — headings, lists, quotes, code, tables, buttons, images (default/wide/full), gallery, cover, media & text, columns, details/summary, separators, and spacer — with your current theme.json settings.

Parts: header, footer

theme.json: Grayscale + primary-blue color palette, 8 fluid font sizes over a system font stack, content width 1000px / wide width 1500px, root padding-aware alignments, block-level style overrides for headings, buttons, quotes, separators, site-title, and site-tagline. Custom gradients disabled; default palettes and gradients stripped.

Shortcodes (one file per shortcode under inc/shortcodes/):

• [current_year] — renders the current year (timezone-aware via wp_date())
• [site_title] — renders the site name from Settings

Text balancing: All headings (h1–h6) and any element with the .text-balance utility class get balanced wrapping via native CSS text-wrap: balance, shipped as a tiny enqueued stylesheet at assets/css/text-balance.css. The legacy .balance-text class name is kept as a backward-compat alias. No JavaScript; degrades gracefully to normal wrapping in browsers that don't yet support the property (Chrome 114+, Firefox 121+, Safari 17.5+).

Block modifications: core/template-part and core/post-content have spacing supports (margin + padding) enabled so they can be tuned from the Site Editor like any other block.

Architecture

functions.php is a thin bootstrap that auto-loads every PHP file under inc/<category>/. Features live in focused, single-responsibility files grouped by concern:

inc/
  shortcodes/      # one file per shortcode
  enqueues/        # asset enqueue logic (scripts, styles, inline blobs)
  block-mods/      # block-layer modifications (supports, styles, render filters, unregistrations)

Drop a new file into the matching category directory and it loads automatically — no registration step. Filenames carry their category as a prefix (shortcode-*.php, enqueue-*.php, block-mod-*.php) so they read clearly in grep output and stack traces. Functions are named with the wp_basetheme_<category>_<feature> pattern — no anonymous closures on hooks.

Narrow utility stylesheets live under assets/css/<feature>.css paired with a matching inc/enqueues/enqueue-<feature>.php. Design tokens still belong in theme.json.

Customizing

This is a starter theme — fork it and modify theme.json for colors, typography, spacing, and layout. Templates and parts use standard WordPress block markup. To preview your design system changes across all block types in one view, create a page and assign it the Style Guide template from the page template picker.