Best Full-site editor theme so far

Last night I spent some time downloading and trying out all the FSE themes I could find. Most of them are still very basic—not even one that has a sidebar, for example. This one was the best I found.

One thing I noticed is that all of the templates are nicely designed, not just a copy of the other templates. Each design has a different query loop to display your posts. Even the 404 page has a query loop which I thought was a nice touch—why not show people recent posts if they land on a page that doesn’t have what they are looking for?

I also like the font chosen for this theme (Raleway). This seems like a small thing, but so far full-site editing themes have almost no font support. It’s actually easier to completely redesign the theme’s home page than it is to pick a different font on any of these themes. And most of them use a very basic font and make it look decent by using extra large text. Unless you plan to change fonts with a plugin/handcoded CSS, you will be stuck with whatever font the theme is made with.

Another consideration is typography, especially since these themes all lack a sidebar. For many FSE themes the text fills the space from left to right. When text is too wide for its size, it becomes difficult to read. The best FSE themes thus have a narrow container column and larger text, as Allele does.

Finally, I liked that out of the box, Allele makes good use of featured images in all of their templates.

No doubt as more FSE themes are developed and new releases expand FSE features, these perks will seem small. But their attention to detail has captured my interest as theme developers to watch out for. I will be using this theme as a starter for most of my projects moving forward.