Here at <em>press, our themes are like our children—we love them all, and we don't like to play favorites. Buuuut, that being said, we do think we've outdone ourselves with the latest! Today, we're so excited to introduce you to Pearl, the newest WordPress theme in the <em>press family.
You'll notice right away that Pearl has a cohesive, branded, editorial feel that feels far more colorful than our other themes. That's because it's the first theme we've released with a default (pink!) color palette. Pink not your thing? Don't worry—with our new built-in color and font customization options, applying your own brand colors is super easy.
Yep, you read that right—starting today, Pearl and all future <em>press themes include BOTH color and font controls directly in the Customizer. You will not need to purchase or maintain a subscription to our Color Pack or Font Customizer plugins in order to edit color and fonts in Pearl!
Read on for this and four more of our favorite Pearl features, below!
When we launched <em>press, our Color Pack and Font Customizer plugins provided our customers with a simple, one-click option to give their themes a designer's touch, without spending hours guessing which fonts and colors worked well together. Over the last year, many of you have written in to let us know you prefer more control over your color and font choices. We hear you! Beginning with Pearl, all themes will feature our new color and font tabs directly in the Customizer, giving you maximum control.
Unique to the Color Options tab is that you can set a global color scheme. So, if you have a set of color hex codes already in use for your blog brand, you can easily apply these colors in up to 5 areas, for automatic application site wide. Want to tweak a color in one or two spots? Drill down into the additional color tabs to control every single link, button, and background across your site.
Similarly, our new Font Options tab integrates directly with Google Fonts, so you can assign your favorite free fonts to the various text areas of your site. In the coming weeks, we'll share some of our favorite undiscovered Google fonts, as well as great combinations you can try in Pearl!
Pearl features our most comprehensive header layout yet, with the option for Top Left, Top Right, and Primary menus. Feature one, two, or all three! Similar to our previous themes, you can opt to feature your logo centered, with the Primary menu underneath it, or to the left, with your Primary menu inline (like this!).
We've also built in a new menu item called the Feature Tab, which gives you space to create a contrasting button directly in one of your menus. Use the Feature Tab to draw special attention to a link or page—it's great for sending readers to your Shop page, Instagram, portfolio, or other seasonal features! See how we've styled it to encourage users to “Buy Theme” in this demo.
One of our most frequently requested features is a Home Page Feature Slider. With Pearl, we've brought this request to life! The slider isn't required—you can opt to show or hide yours! Additionally, the slider can auto-feed in posts from your favorite post or category, or individual posts you custom select. We've even included controls to “skip” a designated number of posts, in case you don't want slider content to duplicate other posts that appear further down the Home Page!
Pearl's Home Page features three different blog feeds, each which customizable post layout options. Most recognizable among these is our “Classic” feed, which features a feed of posts on the left, and a sidebar on the right (you can also switch this layout to feature the sidebar on the left, and content on the right!). New in Pearl, we've included a Grid feed layout (the layout you see under the slider here, labeled “New Posts”), as well as an Offset feed layout, with post images alternating to the right and left (check it out under the “Shop My Picks” label here).
Each layout type has multiple settings you can customize—including turning share, comment, category, and post date details on or off. Additionally, you can target individual feeds to call out targeted content (like a favorite category, or posts you want to highlight), or simply have each display your most recent posts, in reverse chronological order.
A multitude of post layouts in each feed means you can get creative with the overall layout of Pearl! For example, this demo shows what it looks like to hide Pearl's slider, and lead with an Offset post layout. In this demo, a Grid feed post layout leads the post content (under “New Posts”), and draws extra attention to the two posts displayed. Finally, the “Trending” block near the bottom of this example features posts we've individually selected—you can do the same to highlight posts you're readers are always asking about!
We've rebuilt our Customizer from the ground up to make editing more intuitive and easier than ever. With new toggle controls, easy drag and drop features to reorder links, and new tabs to turn interstitials on or off, it's a breeze to set up your Pearl theme (and edit it down the line!).
We are so excited about the release of Pearl and hope you are too! As always, we love hearing from our customers, and can't wait to hear what you think. Feel free to send us a question about Pearl here, or leave a comment below. Cheers, and happy blogging!
