A masthead is the block at the top of a newspaper that states the publication’s name, its edition, and its date. It’s the declaration of what this is and who stands behind it, before a single story runs. Masthead the theme is built on the same idea: it reads as a publication from the first three seconds, not a blog dressed up with a category page.
The utility bar above the navigation carries the publication’s tagline and a subscribe link, the way a masthead carries the date and edition in print. Below it, a breaking-news ticker stays hidden until there is genuinely something to announce, and the front page assembles from real editorial patterns: a lead story with headline and deck, horizontal article cards for a trending sidebar, an opinion-row layout, and a newsletter sign-up block, all built to hold real bylines and real datelines rather than lorem ipsum.
Five named editions ship as one-click style variations: Broadsheet, Tabloid, Midnight, Weekend Edition, and Digital First, so the same content can read as a Sunday broadsheet, a punchy tabloid, or a dark-mode digital magazine without touching a line of CSS. Playfair Display carries the headlines, Lora sets the deck in italic, and Inter runs the utility bar and meta, a pairing chosen to read as newspaper typography rather than a general-purpose sans stack.
The theme has already been through a full WordPress.org theme review cycle, including two rounds of reviewer feedback on accessibility, block-markup validity, and internationalisation, the kind of scrutiny that catches what a design pass alone doesn’t. What shipped is what survived that process, not a first draft.
Closest sibling: Gutter for financial and data publications. Every theme in the collection is free and shares the same accessible core.
What it does well
- Breaking-news ticker that stays hidden until there’s something to announce, not an empty red band on a fresh install
- Five named editions (Broadsheet, Tabloid, Midnight, Weekend Edition, Digital First) as one-click style variations
- Real editorial patterns, lead story, horizontal article cards, opinion row, newsletter CTA, built around actual bylines and datelines
- Playfair Display headlines, Lora deck type, Inter for utility and meta: a genuine newspaper type system
- A reading-progress indicator and drop-cap support for long-form articles
- Zero front-end JavaScript, self-hosted OFL fonts, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility scaffolding
Preview
Download
Masthead is free and open source under the GPLv2 license, and live in the WordPress.org theme directory. Install it directly from your site’s Appearance → Themes → Add New screen, or download the zip from GitHub and install it manually.
License: GPL v2 or later · Requires WordPress 6.7+
Leave a reply