What is Fern

Fern is a blog theme built around a single column of text. There is no sidebar, no widget area beside the content and no grid of cards. The blog is an index — a date, then a title, one post per row — and a post is a page of writing under its heading.

It suits a personal blog, a writing site, a photographer’s or a freelancer’s page: anywhere the words and the pictures are the design.

What comes with it

• The blog, in two layouts. Inline prints each post as one row — the date in a narrow column, the title beside it — so a year of posts reads on one screen. Stack gives each post its thumbnail and its excerpt or full text underneath. See Blog and posts.
• An archives page, an index of the whole blog grouped by year and month, built on a page of your choosing. See Archives.
• Typography and color controls — two font choices from ten built-in stacks or anything installed under Appearance → Fonts, a base size, six color pickers and a reading width. See Design.
• Sixteen link treatments, eight for the writing and eight for the header, the menus and the meta lines, so the two halves of the page can be told apart.
• A header that stays one row at every width. There is no off-canvas panel and no menu script — the theme ships no front-end JavaScript of its own.
• Search with the matched words highlighted in the result titles. See Search.

What it does not do

Fern is deliberately short on options. There are no page builder blocks of its own, no header slider, no sidebar, and no custom post types — posts and pages are all of it. If a setting is not in the Customizer it is not in the theme — write custom CSS for the rest.

Requirements

WordPress 6.0 or later and PHP 7.0 or later, tested up to WordPress 7.1. It is a classic theme, not a block (full site editing) theme. It works with the block editor out of the box, and can put the classic editor and classic widgets back if you prefer them.