Colophon · A free starter core for building WordPress themes

Colophon is the starter core I build the This Is My URL free themes on, and I give it away for the same reason I give away the themes: the method is more useful in your hands than locked in mine. It is deliberately plain — a clean set of bones with the accessibility, performance, and cascade discipline already handled, and the design left for you to add. If you just want a finished theme to install and use, start with Quillwork instead. Colophon is for the person who wants to build their own.

What you get

• A full-site-editing core — every template and template part editable in the Site Editor.
• WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility scaffolding: a skip link, visible focus outlines, sensible heading order, and reduced-motion honoured globally.
• Core Web Vitals discipline: zero front-end JavaScript, self-hostable OFL fonts, and no third-party calls.
• A six-layer CSS cascade and a semantic-token contract, so a re-skin never fights the core.
• The colophon command-line tool for scaffolding a new theme and pulling core improvements forward without touching your design.
• A removable GitHub updater, so an installed copy tells you in the dashboard when a new version ships.

Who it’s for

Theme developers, and people who would like to become them. If you have ever wanted to build a small line of themes that share a real core without a parent-theme dependency, this is the core I built to do exactly that. It assumes you are comfortable with theme.json and a block theme’s templates folder.

How to install

1. Download the theme .zip from the button above.
2. Upload it in WordPress under Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme, then Install Now and Activate.
3. Get oriented at Appearance, Get started.

To build your own theme on Colophon, read ARCHITECTURE.md and GUIDE.md in the repository — they walk through the core-and-skin split and the command-line tool that does the mechanical half of a re-skin for you.

Staying up to date

Once you install Colophon from a GitHub release, it watches the repository and tells you in Appearance, Themes when a newer version is out — the same one-click update you get from any theme. If you would rather it did not do that, for example before submitting a theme built on Colophon to WordPress.org, delete the single file inc/github-updater.php and the updater is gone.

File details

• Version: 1.0.0
• Format: .zip (full theme)
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later
• Requires: WordPress 7.0 or newer, PHP 8.1 or newer