Changelog

Every released version of Fern, newest first. The current version is 0.9.3, which needs WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.0.

Fern is not on wordpress.org yet, so updates are uploaded rather than pushed to your Dashboard — see Install the theme. Your Customizer settings, posts, notes and projects survive an update; they live in the database, not in the theme folder.

0.9.3

• New: A Setup screen at Fern → Setup. One button builds the six pages the theme reads — Home, Notes, Portfolio, Blog, Archives and Search — points the Reading settings and the theme’s own page settings at them, and adds the first five to the primary menu, creating a menu if the site has none. Everything it does is idempotent: a page already assigned is left alone, so is a page that merely shares the slug, and so is a menu item already pointing at one. Running it twice changes nothing the second time. The pages come out empty — there is no demo content to import, because a page with someone else’s words in it is worse than no page at all. Search is the exception, and gets the core search block, since it is nothing without one.
• New: Logo position, in Customize → Site Identity — the logo above the site title, which is what the theme has always drawn, or beside it. It only applies when a logo image is set, so a site running on its title alone is untouched.
• New: Inline post date format, in Customize → Blog. The date on the one-line rows — the Inline blog layout and the homepage list — now has a format of its own, j M, Y out of the box, which prints as 20 Jan, 2026. Short, so the date holds a narrow column and every title starts at the same place; the long form is still right on the post itself and is left on Settings → General. Leave it empty to follow the site format here too. The setting is hidden while Display post meta date is off.
• Change: Header layout, Header width and Blog layout are plain radio buttons. They used to be a picker of little diagrams, which cost the theme a custom Customizer control to draw two boxes each; the labels say the same thing. Nothing you had chosen moves.
• Change: The header prints no empty box when the site title and the tagline are both turned off. The title and tagline are now built into one wrapper before anything is printed, which is also what lets the logo sit beside them.
• Change: The Welcome screen leads with Setup, and links to it from the header and the footer of the page.
• Change: The Accent color and Link style descriptions in Customize → Design say what they do. An accent color on its own changes nothing until a link style asks for it, and in the menus the item for the page you are on always steps back whatever the style is — neither was obvious from the old wording.

0.9.2

• Fix: Only the Stack blog layout keeps its post titles in the text color. The rule reached every .entry-title link on the site, so a note, a project and a single post all had their titles held back from the link style you had chosen.

0.9.1

• Fix: Narrowed the same entry-title rule to listing headings, which had been colouring linked titles at every heading level.

0.9

Released 10 August 2026 — first public release.

• New: Notes, a post type for short posts without a title — a thought, a link, a photo. They run alongside the blog rather than in it, and read as a stream.
• New: The portfolio post type and the project grid, with a photo ratio and a per-page count of its own.
• New: Live search — matching post titles suggested under the search field as the reader types.
• New: The Fern admin menu, directly under Dashboard: Welcome, Theme Settings and Info.
• New: The featured-post star and the thumbnail columns on the posts list.