 I should just learn the hot key for that. All right, thank you, Robo Voice. And welcome everyone. This today's theme is really, really interesting to me because I think I brought up this plugin a couple times in other workshops. And it's kind of just been like I bring it up and it becomes a mystery that I haven't tested myself. So I'm really thoroughly excited today because this Create Blocking plugin is supposed to help a lot of makers in WordPress create block themes without specifically needing code specific knowledge. So we're gonna run through how that would look today. And yeah, I'm really excited to share this content with you all. I will preface this with, we will probably not go through and create all of a site's templates today. I only scheduled an hour, unfortunately, we should at least be able to get the homepage done. So to get started, let's talk through a few points to help you get in the creativity zone. We'll talk through what this plugin actually is. And then we'll do a little sandbox session of trying to create that homepage with the plugin itself. So getting into the creative zone, I think some people they just like get hit with the muse and they know what they're doing right away. Some people just rely on their exquisite design background knowledge. And others also rely on references. And I'm kind of one of those visual learners. So I do like to use or look, research a lot of references when I'm thinking about the design of things. So in this regard, I thought to give you some examples of a few themes. Our theme library is full of so many great themes that have designers who put in the work to think through a lot of the composition and layout already. So I highly recommend folks to start with either visiting their favorite sites depending on what type of site you're trying to make. In this case, if you're making a travel related site, you know, look up your favorite place where you wanna travel and see what sites come up. Maybe they might give you some inspiration or you can check out the WordPress.org themes repository and search there for travel themes because there's a lot in there. This is, I just chose three to start but there were basically hundreds in there for you to just browse through and get inspiration from. Maybe even install and then create a theme off of it depending on your use case. But that's really up to you. Just something that will get you into the creative zone and note what you like best about those references. Once you have a good idea of what you like, I recommend you to get out your digital or manual pen and get to planning. I just did a light sketch here of what I would like this homepage to look like. So at the top here, you can see there's maybe a tagline to the left. We can see also in the middle, a circular logo links to the right. I like a big header at the top. So I put that space in there, maybe three posts in the middle with some featured images, a little section. And then below, since my site today is gonna be about travel blogging, I wanted to also have like this kind of puzzle piece space at the bottom where you can see different posts and like a quote unquote sidebar space on the far right. So this seems like a lot, but through this demo, I'm gonna share with you how to make all this magic happen with the site editor. And then we can also take this into a theme form. But as you're going through, don't think, oh my gosh, I've had this amazing layout, I don't know how to actually put it together. There are amazing patterns in the wordpress.org pattern directory to also help you along. So if you're like, okay, this is the composition I'd like, I've sketched it all out, but I really don't know which blocks to use, how to get there, how to make it look the way I envision it. There's so many great people who've designed different patterns. You can also design a pattern as well and share it with the world. But you could definitely grab what you need from this pattern library and plug it into the page that you're trying to create. That's totally fine as well. But once you've got all of that, we'll wanna make sure that we have our create block theme plugin installed. So this plugin essentially allows you to create a new theme and export it all within the wordpress admin. And there's a lot of options here. You can create a new theme from a theme you have installed, like duplicate it essentially. You can create a child theme from the theme you have installed. You can just start from a blank theme slate and make your theme from scratch. And that's what we're gonna work on today. Or you can also just create a style variation. So if you were to have a 2023 installed, for example, you could create a new style variation for 2023 if that's the theme you just want to create. Or after you've created your new blank theme, you can use this plugin to also create a style variation. So it's really taking out the need for you to do a lot of that coding background work yourself. And we're gonna look in the backend of how this plugin is set up and those kinds of options that it'll give you. So a couple other resources I wanted to share or like quick tips essentially is when you're building a site, it's kind of hard to, at least for me, to envision how the site is gonna look if there's no content. Because when you're building a theme, you're not putting content into it, right? You wanna have placeholder areas where the content that's added to the site will propagate. So I would say if you're creating this new site for this theme, just try to have some dummy content ready, placeholder content ready, so that when you use a query loop, for example, and it's trying to pull your posts, it doesn't just come up blank. You have a few posts where you can see how your art is coming to action here. So definitely have some placeholder content ready, have some images at the ready as well. And then I like to set some post excerpts and featured images too, especially as I was saying, if we're gonna be dynamically pulling up posts via the query loop, that just gives you a lot more to play around with visually if that content is already set. Here's some links to those. And as usual, the slides will definitely be shared with folks after the call as well. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you all my demo setup today or sandbox setup today. It's, if you've been with me before, not very different from what I usually do here, but we're gonna be using local for the local environment, the create block theme plugin 2023 and WordPress 6.1.1. I'm using all of the latest versions of everything I'm sharing with you today because I just wanna make sure, especially when you're putting a plugin on your site, there's things you wanna check, like whether or not that plugin is compatible with the latest version that you're using. So it's good to always kind of check between that version and your theme or your version of WordPress as well. Okay, so I do love giving options though. So if you're not into local WP or the themes that I've listed, oh, thank you, Laura, to point it out that there's wordpress.org slash photos for free images as well. All the free things. And speaking of more free things, here's some more themes. I've chosen solely block themes and local environment setups that you can test and play around with. I just find local to be pretty push start easy. So, but I understand that doesn't work for everyone. So choose what works best for you. Okay, so I put sandbox time here, but I will give a pause in case there are any questions before we dive in, tactfully give myself a little water break. Okay, well, if that's not the case, please feel free to type. We'll be looking at the chat, me and my co-host and we'll answer there, or feel free to raise your voice as we're going along here. But to start, this is a fresh install of WordPress here, just for this session. Just my share screen a little bit. There you go, so you can see the whole admin bar as well. What I have done here is I've created a bunch of posts as I was saying, right? So I categorized a few of them. We're not gonna get into that much today, but I wanted to have some content ready. So as we're going along and adding stuff here, I don't need to go and grab new images along the way or create posts. So we have a few posts at the ready here and we're gonna work with these. But to get started, you'll see here, if I go to appearance themes, I just have baseline 2023 installed at the moment. This is what it would look like if I did absolutely nothing and just installed the theme, essentially. My travel theme is Japan, of course, but we're gonna play with the create block theme plugin. So I'm gonna go to plugins here, add new, let's do a little search, where are you at? There it is, it's by WordPress.org. So brilliant folks in the community who are bringing you WordPress. Yes, yes, let's see what this plugin looks like. So it's this nice little blue block with a C, very simplistic pixel-like. We're gonna activate it here. And so what changes is when you go now, once it's activated, is that you'll see this create block theme and manage theme font section. So let's check this out real quick. When you get into the create block theme, and I'm gonna just make this a little bigger, at least for me, it's a little small and I'll put it back after. I just wanna be able to capture this better on the screen. We have a few options as soon as you get to this plugin page, you can export 2023, which we didn't really wanna do. It's just gonna export it as it is. Oh, it's great when it's bigger. Awesome. We can create a child of 2023. So it'll just create a child of it so that you can create new variations. We can clone 2023. This will have all of the assets of the activated theme as well as the user changes, but this will essentially like clone it, but 2023 won't be the parent theme, if that makes sense. We can overwrite 2023. Actually, as I'm going through, I'm so sorry. Let me click on each one. So when I click on it, we get different options as well. Theme name, short description, you can add it to your public page where people can find more information. These settings typically don't change, except when you're exporting, you're not gonna get that setting, creating, cloning, it's a similar thing. You wanna name your new cloned theme, and that's the only thing required of this. So if you just wanna get in and get started, you don't have to fill in all this information. You can edit that later. You can just start with the theme name. Also overwrite, you see that option disappears because you're overwriting what's already there. So there's not much that's gonna be editable in terms of the theme information. Create a blank theme. This is a new theme creation. So you're gonna name your theme at the minimum, and then create style variation. And you see here, it says, save user changes as a style variation of 2023. It's essentially using what's currently installed when it's telling this directive here. So right now, if I was just like, hey, I would like to make a style variation of 2023 named gold, it would create that name, and then I should be able to edit and save that. So question, if you clone the theme, will there be changes if the theme updates? So that I believe is the difference between creating a child theme or overwriting. In my mind, I believe it has the assets, but it's not the same theme if that makes sense. So it's like, yeah, you clone it and then you can make all the changes, but it's not gonna update whenever 2023 updates is how I believe this functionality works. So it will update because you'll probably name it something else. Yes, right, exactly. So I think that's where the naming portion is critical too, like, because that's a way, and where the public URL where users can find more information about, it's like creating a new theme. So when you create a child theme as well, its parent theme will be 2023, and then you can have variations within your child theme so that when the parent theme updates, your child theme edits don't change. So I do wanna note a couple of things here too, and let me share a resource for child themes. So if you decide you wanna make a child theme, for example, if you're making extensive customizations beyond styles and a few theme files, creating a parent theme like cloning might be a better option than a child theme because creating a parent theme allows you to avoid issues with deprecated code as well in the future. And this needs to be decided on like a case-by-case basis. And when you create a child theme, it inherits the look and feel of the parent theme and all of its functions, but can be used to make modifications to any part of the theme. So those are some critical points to note if you're trying to think about do I clone versus do I want a child theme? How many edits are you hoping to make? Is the parent theme actually perfect, but this one little thing? Or do you wanna change a lot about the parent theme? And if you wanna change a lot about it, it might be best to clone it or create a theme from scratch. And we have another question. Can you make a child theme of a Genesis theme? We're asking for clarification. Are we referring to a theme made with a Genesis framework? Or is there a theme called Genesis? It would need to be a theme that is installed on your site. So if this is a theme installed on your site, you could clone it. But Ben is answering or sharing some more information about WordPress Genesis and child themes. Maybe that will be helpful for you. Okay, but please keep the questions growing. This is really great already. For today's demo though, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna create a blank theme, which sounds a little scary, but it's actually not too bad, I promise you. So we'll name this theme my travel theme. You know, I'm very descriptive here. And we're gonna click generate. Bam, that was what? Like two seconds, blank theme created, head over to appearance and themes. Okay, let's head over to appearance and themes. And I'm gonna just one down size here. But you can see here, my travel theme. It's already ready. And because I didn't input any information about this, there's nothing here, right? You see, there's no image, there's no description. It's bi-anonymous, it sounds a little foreboding, but it's not. If I had decided to put all that information in, it would have propagated in this. So at the bare minimum, you can get away with, you know, just having this theme with a name. And then you can edit these theme informational details afterward. So I'm gonna go ahead and activate this theme. And if we refresh my page, it's pretty bleh. It's not giving anything fun right now. And that's because it doesn't have any template pages. So I do wanna double back here for the vocal record here. We have some folks chiming in around Genesis. Linda's saying that Genesis is the building block similar to WordPress, but there are themes that go with Genesis that are already child themes of Genesis. Is a separate framework. Yes, the create block theme plugin works with any block theme, that's correct. So Genesis, Elementor, Divi et al will be different. Yes, and Nomad is noting that there'll be less and less need for these frameworks with what we're learning today. Yay, yeah, I hope so. Okay, with this activated, we're gonna do one thing first. So let's look at this managed theme fonts. Right here, you see that all I have is the system font, which means that that's the only font I'm gonna be able to play around with in this new theme of mine. But we want variety here. So let's add a couple of fonts. And I do wanna share that these are pulled from Google fonts and it's pretty easy to select a new font. I just clicked on add font and maybe it's a little too easy because you get this long list of fonts that you could use for your site, which is great too, because variety is amazing. But if you don't know what these fonts look like, don't worry, there's a little preview you get as well and you can check which variants you want. So you don't have to have every single type of this font with your new theme. You can just select a couple of versions. I know this one, so I'm gonna put that in there. Let's see, that's a little too much for me. But you can have fun with this too. This is probably not the fastest way to review a lot of fonts. I just linked you the fonts.google.com where you can more quickly see which fonts are at your disposal here. But that would probably be the best way, in my opinion, to see which fonts you can add at a glance. Otherwise, you're gonna be like clicking, looking, clicking, looking. So definitely utilize this resource to get a quick look at what could be the fit for you. Okay, I just chose a couple of fonts you don't wanna spend too much time there, but as you can see, you already have so much at your disposal here in terms of font variations, which is pretty awesome and something that was pretty difficult before you had to have, at least in my experience, where I don't have that much technical knowledge, it had to like add another plugin to do this. All right, so we chose a couple of fonts. So here we go, we have a couple of questions. So I've gone through Google Fonts and made a list of my favorites on a Post-it note. Yes, Laura, that is really good. Actually, I should add that to the quick tips, like get your fonts ready too. You don't wanna spend hours just reviewing fonts and you just wanna build a theme. And if you add too many Google Fonts, doesn't it slow down your site? How many is too many from Karen? That is a good question. I'm not sure if it would slow down your site too much, but I'm always in the team of use only what you need. If you install 50 plugins, for example, you're probably gonna bog down performance. If you install 50 fonts, are you gonna use all of those fonts? We have to be a little realistic there too. And if someone has a more direct answer, please do chime in. But in the meantime, I'm gonna go to the editor. And right now you see at the top here, index is the page that we're playing with right now. When you have no other templates on your site, index is the only template that you're gonna have. And it's basically just gonna pull up all of your posts. But of course, this isn't really giving us some front page energy. So I'm gonna click here on the left and then go to templates. And then you can see, oh yeah, I just have index, but we can add more. And today we wanna add a front page template. So shock, it doesn't look much different from the index, but that's okay. This is where you now as the theme creator can start playing around with your new theme. So if we kind of double back to my sketch here, we can just review some of the aspects I wanted. So probably my header needs to be changed. We need this header image here, and maybe like a cover block, and then three featured articles. So let's work on that first half. We've got some action going on in the chat, but looks okay. There's an article on Google Fonts clogging up your site. So we can try to grab the link to that too for folks to reference later. Okay, so opening up the list view is gonna be the best way in my opinion to just figure out what's going on here. So just looking at the header alone, you can see this isn't quite the flow that I want. In the header and footer, I wanna make sure folks know our two template parts as well. So that's why they have this little fancy icon. And I don't have to edit it here. So I'm gonna go click my header and click edit. It's gonna take me to the header template part. So I'll just play around with this here a bit. This just gives me like a dedicated space to update the header. So I've already got a couple of things in my navigation, but this logo should be in the middle. I probably don't need to rows. So let's see here. I don't have to completely change too much of what's going on, but I'm gonna pull my logo out into this row on the top. Yeah, maybe I want the site tagline. I'm gonna pull that above here, or site title. Let's see the site title. Yeah. Don't want the site tagline. I'm gonna remove it. I do want the navigation. Let's push this here. And then I'm gonna remove this other row. So everything is now on one row. And you see here, there's this huge space at the bottom. I don't want that either. I'm gonna remove the spacer. I kind of want it to be flush. Oh, no worries Linda. I chose the create a blank theme. So we're completely going from scratch here. And I've just created now a homepage template and we're playing with the header of that. So to get a bit more into it here, let me see, let's stretch this out a little bit more. These panels are a little big. Okay. Yeah, so here we can see what's going on with my groups. There's a lot of spacing that I could apply here to the group as a whole. For one, I don't like that this row is so flush to the side. So I've selected the row. And I think the bottom and the top is fine, but left, you see now on the left, this is flush, but I bumped it up to two. It's now a little more centered. And I can do the same on the right side as well. So let's do that. And I'm gonna work with the same kind of universal setting here. So let's update this to maybe four on the top and four on the bottom. And that is pretty much thick enough for me. Another thing I wanted to change is this site logo from square to rounded. So I'm just gonna round that off there. And here with my site title, I don't want it to be a link. And I don't want it to say create block theme. So let's say Japan travel or something to denote what type of site it is. And you can see here, let's look at the typography for a second because we wanna see if my font families that I chose are even here. So default is set, but yes, the cabin and Roboto that I chose for my theme are here. So let's put it in Roboto. And honestly, that looks fine to me. The only other thing, let's leave this like this for now. So we're done playing with the header. There's a couple of changes now that I've made, right? I've changed the title. So it's gonna ask me if I wanna change that throughout the whole site, which I do. And now because I edited this template part, it's asking me to update it. So I do wanna update that. And from there, we can go back to our site template and our front page. So now the header that I've just edited is ready for action here. Looking all right, looking better than before. But what I had next was a kind of cover area. So I'm gonna just click these three vertical dots and then do insert after and do a cover block. I did a backslash and typed in cover that backslash allows you to search through the block library. And I already have some images loaded up in my media library. So I'll just choose one of these nice little images here. Let's do these beautiful mountains. And I don't know, I'm not gonna write anything here. I have the title up there. If you wanted to, you could, I don't know, live your best life list, your best list. Actually that kind of works too. But live, oh my gosh, live your best life if you want to write something there. You don't have to. I just wanna give you all of you of what that could look like. And let's change the font here to a Roboto. So with the cover image as well, you have things like opacity settings of this overlay. You can make it as dark or as light as you'd like and write text over it. I hear that text on an overlay is not always the best. So I'm gonna just remove that for now, especially cause my tagline was a little silly. And now what we have is this kind of this flesh header. Ooh, it's not flesh, I want it to be flesh. So we can work on that too. Sometimes as you're going through, you'll discover there's just some dimensions that are not making it as flesh as you want it to. So I did get this flesh before and you can just play around and find the setting cause there is something here. And it might be in the row, not the bottom, not the margin. Sometimes it's grouping, I'm gonna try on grouping real quick. It's not the grouping. Well, we'll figure this out. Our next step here is creating this three featured posts here. So what I'm gonna do is under my cover, do an insert after. And so I'll show you another way to add blocks here. I'll just click this, add, oh, add pattern. That's gonna tell me to add a block. That's not what I wanna do, but that's very interesting. Well, I'm gonna click here and do my backslash because I want a query loop. I know I have one below, but I wanna show the fresh start of a query loop here. So we're gonna choose, you can start blank, which isn't actually blank. It'll ask you if you want to do things like the title or excerpt at minimum. But here, when you click on choose, you have some patterns already available to you. And this is another reason why having content already in there is just better for these kinds of choices because otherwise you won't be able to get this visual representation of what you want it to look like. So I am gonna do this one where it has things in a row, a column of three, but I only want three posts to show up here. And I don't, there's a couple of changes I wanna make. So right now it's inheriting the query from the template. I'm gonna turn that off. So now I can manipulate to this query loop a bit more. There's this display settings. And right now it's items for page six. I'm gonna move that to three. So now I only have that three section. And then going a little deeper into my query loop, we can see the composition of it. So we've got the post title. I wanted a featured image, actually. And as I was playing around with this, I discovered something really fun, which was I put a cover here and I chose use featured image as the cover. So now the featured image of the post that I am choosing is there dynamically, which I hadn't done before. If you have done it before, I'm sorry, I'm not showing something new, but I thought that was really cool because now I'm gonna grab these three and then put it under the cover. Okay, and hold it right a moment. Okay, don't worry, I'm gonna fix this. But I'm gonna remove this paragraph. Sometimes I do wanna point this out. I get confused sometimes when I click on this and I'm like, oh, where's the remove? Just scroll, take a breath and just scroll down a little, it's there. It's getting into quite long of a menu now, but I can remove it that way. Okay, so now we have all this great stuff, but we can't see anything. I'm gonna do another insert before and do a little cover inception here, cover inception. And then drag this stuff into that cover. So we've got a double cover here, but in the back is my featured image, to which you're like, but Destiny, you can't even see it now, what are you up to? This is where you could have that fun overlay, play around, fade thing. Just make sure your other colors are strong so that you don't make it difficult for folks to click through. So I just wanted to point that out as an option to folks because I thought that was pretty interesting. You can also then go in and add a background to group this, for example, and then add a background color so that it's not as strong and it looks wild in that sizing, but I just wanted to show, yeah, give you all some ideas of how this could actually look. So let's save here. And this was the front page before, it wasn't giving much creativity, but now we've added a couple of things. And already I think it's looking like a sight. Of course, this could still use some love, changing this overlay, like the white on the overlay color, doesn't look so great. So these are just some ideas, no one was noting that you can play around with to make it look like a unique sight. And so whenever these posts get updated, new posts get added, it's gonna automatically pull in the featured image in the back. It'll automatically have this design, which is pretty interesting to me. I'm gonna remove that white background is a little distracting for me. And yeah, you can do all your other design things like centering the title, add a read more button, as it tells you to, you can move things around here, just to make it your own. And I'll do an insert after and read more. Something I like to do with the read more button is just give it some, well, it's just read more link, but you can make it look like a button. I should clarify that. Let's give it some there. So people can click into these posts. So already it's looking like, hopefully a theme that someone would try to install on their site for travel. More design is always something you can do. Okay, I'm gonna stop there. We've already got halfway through here. And let me see here, we've got another question. Little advanced, but can you set the query loop to allow posts from different categories? For example, if you have three categories, like BNB, marinas and hotels, could you set the first block to bring in BNBs, the middle block to bring in marinas, and the block to the right? Yes, Linda, but not in this way. You would use columns for that or rows. Maybe rows would be best. So you would create three rows with three different query loops and then set those categories in those query loops. So then I hope it's making sense already, but it's each contained query loop. Yeah, but if you wanted to, since this is one single query loop, if you're like, I want only those two categories or three categories to be shown here, that's where going down in the query loop and using the filter taxonomies will be really helpful here. If you just wanted in this section alone, the three top categories to show, for example. But if you want each row to show a different one, each time that is updated, yeah. Try a row or a column. I think row would be best. Okay, so we've done a little design fun right there. You could do design forever. We only got 18 minutes, so I'm gonna do an insert after here as well. I will put a little asterisk here and say try to click the whole block before doing an insert after. You don't wanna get caught doing an insert after while you're still inside the kind of group that you've created. And here I'm gonna do another cover with just a color here because I just wanna have a section. So hottest new travel spots. I know I'm really bad at thinking up taglines, but here with a cover, you can manipulate how big this is. You can also make sure that it is edge to edge, toggle full height with your content. If you wanna be doing something similar to what we did above, you can do your cover reception again and add another cover, color, and then have your text in there instead. And then you have this kind of cover in a cover thing where you can manipulate that a bit further as well, maybe adjust the overlay a little bit. And that gives you just a little bit more design difference there. Okay, so that's our section, our cover cover section. And I'm gonna do an insert after there because going back to our thing, we've almost nailed it all, but now we have this section here where we want posts and this section here where we want like a kind of sidebar thing. So I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna use, this is a hard choice. So, sorry, I'm having to get internal battle. When I did this demo by myself, I did do a column. I think there's like some false sense of security when it comes to columns because especially they give you this visual reference of what it's gonna look like. So I'm gonna stick with what I did before just to show you how I've done it. But essentially this left column is gonna have my query loop with my posts and then my right column is gonna have my sidebar, whatever that's gonna be. So in this column, let's start adding a query loop. And as you can see here, what I wanted was like one big one here and then like two posts on the side. And this is kind of getting into what you were talking about just now, Linda. What I did here was actually before this I'm gonna insert before. I did a row within the column. Yeah, and that's where I put my query loop. So I'm gonna drag and drop this query loop. It's gonna be really fast, but drag and drop it into there. And then I can choose the kind of big style that I wanted here, which was something like this should be fine. Yeah, actually I like how this looks. Let's do one of these. And then once again, pardon me. Since we don't want a bunch of posts here, we wanna have more modify it, make it more modifiable. So I'm gonna remove the setting to inherit query from template and mess with the items for page. So I want one item per page. There you go. Sometimes, okay, I do wanna note this too. Sometimes as you're going around playing with the query loop it doesn't update automatically. Don't get scared that your changes aren't being made here. Just try to click around to another area on the site so that it can update or just save and publish and you'll be fine. I countered that a couple of times, but I just wanna note, don't freak out. It's still capturing what you're trying to do. So this query loop, I have only one showing. And what I did here as well because that same ikutsuima tour is at the top. These are the top three ones. I want this post to start from four. So I get an entirely new post down here in this section. So it's only gonna show one and it's gonna show from four. So this means the fourth post. It's gonna skip the first three and show the fourth post. So that's what I've done in this column. And this definitely gets tricky very quickly. So let's have a look here. Mountainscapes, huh? Or did I just psych myself out? Let me tell myself, let me do what I said. I should do a little refresh here. No, it's still pulling. So I think there's two columns in here, but that is okay. The template, the query loop template you used added an extra column. Added an extra column. Okay, brilliant. So then we'll just pull this up. Will you not let me? Ha-ha. Okay, and then we'll... Actually, oh yeah. No, that's fine. Okay, cool. Let's remove this here. There we go. Crisis averted. What are you? You're another group, go away. Okay, as someone said before, this is the reality of creating a theme. Okay, so we have this one row with this one item with that design that I wanted. But we also want on the other side of it to have another query loop. So I'm going to do an insert after here and we'll do another query loop. And for this one, we can keep it simple as well and choose maybe this one here. It'll give me two things on the side. Going into the settings once more, we're going to do the same formula we did with the other one. So now this one should be offset by five so that it's not showing us again this Japanese mountainscapes post. And then I only want two shown here. Right now it's looking a little wild, don't worry. It's not obeying my... Hey, Destiny, you just put the numbers opposite of what you wanted. Oh, thank you so much too. I was like, well, this is getting wild. And five, thank you. All right, perfect. So we have those two new items showing right there. And let's save so we can see what this looks like on the front page and refresh. Okay, this is all right, but definitely the left side is not the sizing I wanted and that could be definitely due to the query loop that I chose for this. So I would say don't be discouraged by that. You can just manipulate the query loop with another pattern or adjust it yourself to something different. So I won't, in the essence of time, I won't keep playing around with that because there's some other aspects we wanted to work on today, but I did wanna show how you can have two different types of post styles here. And then we can work with some kind of sidebar which I don't know, for some sites, it might be like a subscription kind of thing. So maybe you wanna add here, and I should have found like a kind of subscribe template. Well, this is where patterns might come in handy. So I've just pulled up this patterns directory here so that we can see if there's anything we can just quickly steal for the sidebar. Cause I honestly just wanted some kind of like, hey, subscribe to our newsletter type thing. And with this, I'm gonna copy here and go in here. This one looks just fine. Copy pattern, jump back to here. And hopefully while I'm there, I can just paste in there. Let's see, maybe I need a paragraph first and paste. So now we have on the, yeah, perfect. Work smarter, not harder pattern that we just chose and I just pasted it right there. There's a subscribe block now. Maybe I don't have that. Maybe I need Gutenberg installed on this site. But let's save that and do a refresh. So now I have this kind of sidebar space. And I know some of you are thinking, doesn't this does not look design beautiful? And you know, that's fine. That's why you can keep playing around with it, right? We just wanna have like the basic principles of the layout that we want, right? And then we can keep working on the design afterward. And my last thing here that I had was, oops, sorry about that, some more posts at the bottom here. So after all of this column work is said and done, I would simply just add a, let's go under this column. Yeah, here we are. Ooh, we're just gonna add another query loop. Not from the pattern though. Oh, here we go. Let's do an insert after and we'll add one last query loop very quickly. This one that I added was three posts. So we're gonna do another template three posts one. You can also duplicate a pattern that you've already created. So I think there's a sub, subscribe. Yeah, that's a good point, Ben, that the subscribe boxes are usually introduced by plugins or your host. So as you're creating a theme, this is placeholder, right? Like this is telling your potential activator of your theme, hey, this is where you could put a subscribe to your newsletter section. So they can replace this with their subscription service of choice. But after here, I'm just gonna add to this one last query loop. We're getting down to the wire here, but a featured image just so we can see some things here and do that one last manipulation of the query loop. Block, so it doesn't inherit. We can make sure that we're doing the right thing here, items for page three. And then now we wanna offset from, I think it should be seven now. I'm gonna do six just so we can see one more. I should have created more and more posts. But now we have those three posts at the bottom that maybe loads more if people keep scrolling and we'll go back to the front and refresh. So there are so many other little design things I wanted to do, but design takes time. And first, just getting the layout you want is critical. So I think I've done as much as I can here and it's all saved. So I just wanna show you all one last thing. Going back to the dashboard, we can go to create block theme. And now once you've done your finishing design touches and made it as beautiful as you'd like, we can export my travel theme. And I'm gonna quickly open up one other test site that I have, my throwback to my plant mom journey here. And we're gonna go to appearance and just add this theme we created and install now. Theme installed successfully. Yes, that's the first step. And let's activate it. Oh, actually, hold on. Let me go, we're gonna activate this. Let's do the before and after. So if we visit the site now, this is my plant mom journey. It's all right. This was built with patterns. I've duplicated this monstera post a couple of times for this purpose. And let's activate now the new travel theme that we've just created with this create block theme and refresh. So now it's following, I mean, it's not that pretty right now, but the design aspects that we've put in to the travel theme we just created. So these three spotlighted posts with the featured image behind. We have our double cover. We have that layout that looks somehow better on here. I guess it's the pictures. And then that sidebar and then the three posts. So it's following the principles, the principle layout that we set for the theme that we just created. Last step, make it pretty or prettier. And that's all I have for you today, folks. I know that was a lot. I hope there was enough time for you to digest a bit of it. But within 40 minutes, we created the framework of a theme. And from there, you can of course, work on creating your other template pages for your theme once the homepage is down. And yeah, yes, that's correct. So you can take your newly created theme and sell it or share it. It's 100% new block theme created by you. You'll just wanna edit all the details. So the new theme would need to be updated by you. So there's a couple of things you could do. You could put the code on GitHub and update it there. If you have, I'm not really like too sure about this, but like if you're like a theme dispensary, like you can push the updates, right? From where it's hosted. But in general, this right now, my version 0.1 would just exist as it is until I decide to update it and create a version two, for example. I think maybe versioning would need to be a separate session. Yeah, I'm glad you think it's awesome, Linda. Yay, I think it's awesome too. The first time I did this theme, it looked a little better, not gonna lie, but I think that's because I had way more time to play with it, but that's okay. It's not about making it look pretty, it's about making sure we all understand like what's possible. So as you go along here, I do wanna share with you a couple of resources. As you're playing with this, there is the support thread for this. So if you have any questions, anything goes wrong, please definitely share that with the community. And then to get some inspiration on blocks, you can also look at the pattern. Linda asks, if you want to update, you could create your new theme as a child theme. You totally could. If you just wanna make a few edits, yeah, why not? About time, wow, that would buy so quickly. I'm gonna stop my share. Thank you so much, everyone. I had so much fun. Thank you for as always the brilliant questions you have. You really always get my mind loading up and thinking about things differently.