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 excerpt or its full text underneath.
• 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.
• A portfolio, a post type for projects, shown as a grid of photographs with a page of its own behind each one.
• An archives page, an index of the whole blog grouped by year and month.
• Live search, which suggests matching post titles under the search field as the reader types.
• A featured flag, set from the star column on the posts list. It marks a post for your own queries — see Featured posts.
• A setup button that builds the pages, the menu and the settings in one click. See Set up the site.

What it does not do

Fern is deliberately short on options. There are no page builder blocks of its own, no demo content to import, no header slider and no sidebar. 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. The theme works with the block editor out of the box, and can put the classic editor and classic widgets back if you prefer them.