fraew — modern light is a clean, typographic WordPress theme for writers, journals, catalogues and long-running blogs. It pairs a warm off-white palette with Space Grotesk headings, IBM Plex Sans body copy and IBM Plex Mono metadata, and lays posts out in two columns with a right sidebar and footer widget areas.
It requires no plugins and is fully functional on its own.
An archive, not a magazine
Most blog themes are built for marketing. This one is built for a body of work that grows over years. Small editorial touches give it a catalogue character: a running “Entry” counter in the homepage hero, a mono metadata row (author, date, category) beneath each post title, and an eyebrow label above it.
Everything is driven by core WordPress features — menus, widgets, the Customizer, featured images and the custom header — so there is nothing to learn beyond WordPress itself.
Features
- Two-column post layout with an optional right sidebar — posts run full width when the sidebar is empty
- Homepage hero with an optional headline, sub-headline and header image, falling back to your site title and tagline
- Three footer widget columns
- Custom logo, custom header image and custom menus, with accessible dropdown sub-menus
- Accessible — skip link, visible keyboard focus, and a keyboard-friendly search modal
- Hybrid theme — a
theme.jsonexposes the palette, fonts, type scale and spacing as block-editor presets, with matching editor styles so the editor reflects the front end - Self-hosted fonts — no external requests. Fonts are bundled (woff2, SIL Open Font License) and registered in
theme.json, so they also appear in the WordPress Font Library - Block styles — Eyebrow heading, Panel group and Hairline separator
- Three starter block patterns — Entry intro, Two-column text, and Quote with citation
- Custom background colour support
- Translation-ready, and works with the block editor’s wide and full alignments
Privacy by default
The fonts are bundled with the theme rather than loaded from Google Fonts. The theme makes no external requests at all — nothing about your visitors leaves your server, which keeps the theme straightforward under GDPR and similar regimes.
Matching companion plugins
The theme publishes a design-token contract: it declares support for fraew-design-tokens and exposes its palette and type as CSS custom properties. Companion plugins can detect this and skin themselves to match automatically, so they look native rather than bolted on. The theme itself contains no plugin-specific code, and works perfectly well without any of them.
- fraew Category Posts List — a sidebar list of the current post’s siblings
- fraew Custom Adverts — a simple, tracked advert widget
Getting started
- Go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme.
- Upload the theme zip, click Install Now, then Activate.
- Open Appearance → Customize → Theme Options to set the header tagline, homepage hero text, established year and optional header button. All are optional — leave them blank and the theme uses your site title and tagline.
- Set your menus under Appearance → Menus (use the “Primary Menu” location for the main navigation).
Requirements
- WordPress 6.0 or later
- PHP 7.4 or later
Support
Questions and bug reports are welcome — get in touch via thebigcity.co.nz. The source lives on GitLab.
The theme is free, licensed GPLv2 or later. If it is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee.