Use Customizer Color Settings to Create a Gutenberg Color Palette

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Most WordPress themes within the past few years have included helpful options in the WordPress customizer to help users quickly and easily modify how their theme behaves and looks. In fact, it is a requirement to list your theme on WordPress.org to only use the Customize API and not the Settings API.

With the new Gutenberg editor (soon to take over the role of just “the editor”) a new use-case for these custom colors has risen. Gutenberg offers the ability to define a custom color palette that can be used wherever blocks allow colors to be chosen. By default this includes paragraph text and background colors.

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Require Minimum PHP Version to Activate a WordPress Theme

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WordPress core only requires PHP 5.2 to run properly. This is great for compatibility with older hosts but this version of PHP was also released in 2006. Using a newer version of PHP provides more security, access to better development tools, and most of all: speed!

For this reason BigBox sets a minimum PHP version of 7.0 — which should be readily available on any reputable hosting company. Below is a quick snippet that blocks a theme from activating if it does not meet the defined PHP version and reverts the website back to the default theme.

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Better View Handling in WordPress Themes

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WordPress theme structure has largely stayed the same for the last 15 years. There are many great thing about the build in templating system in WordPress, such as the extensive and flexible hierarchy loading system, helpful conditional tags, and more.

However as themes become more complex the forced expectations of where template files are located can become frustrating. Looking at a theme’s root directory and finding a mix of stylesheets, template files, configuration files, project documentation, shell scripts, and more can be overwhelming.

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“Lifestyle” BigBox Demo

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BigBox is optimized for thousands of products its flexible and customizable nature means it’s very easy to tailor to theme to your needs.

To show this we have put together a more stylized “Lifestyle” shop demo.

“Lifestyle” Demo Homepage

This demo does not use any extra plugins, simply a bit of custom CSS code (shared below) to completely transform the look of BigBox. The custom homepage was created in Gutenberg and WooCommerce’s [products] shortcode block to bring attention to featured products on the homepage.

View the Demo

With a few color changes, typography updates, and a little additional CSS the BigBox WooCommerce theme can be completely transformed to fit your needs.

Have you made something amazing with BigBox? We’d love to see it in the comments below!

We’ve also tweaked our default demo to make it a little more generic, and added even more products!

What’s New in BigBox 1.6.0

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There have been a few silent releases since the initial 1.0.0 release of BigBox. All feedback from the initial release has been very helpful and further testing has helped improve BigBox already! Some of the highlights from the past few releases include:

BigBox is constantly evolving and improving. Be sure you stay up to date and if you have any further suggestions please feel free to contact us!

Download the Latest Version