OsixthreeO – A flexible, Lightweight, Multi-purpose WordPress Theme

OsixthreeO is the culmination of many years of WordPress theme building. Every nook and cranny has been fussed over countless times and there is still a ToDo list, a Wish list and a What If list. However, when it comes to WordPress themes each of us has their own set of likes, dislikes and priorities and this theme, naturally, reflects mine.

While building OsixthreeO I considered the most popular WordPress themes, most of which include or support page builders. I also considered how WordPress itself is trending heavily on the block editor which bears striking resemblance to a page builder.

Many of the popular themes also provide controls for fonts, backgrounds, colors, padding, positioning, widths, borders, shading, etc… Either via the WordPress customizer or in a custom options panel or both, these themes give access to literally everything. Naturally this results in hundreds of checkboxes, color controls, range controls, drop-downs and input boxes.

All these controls are, of course, organized in a perfectly understandable, intuitively labeled interface that everyone can navigate 😉

I also considered the many, many WordPress ‘users’ that just want to load and go and in some cases, to never again log into their website’s admin.

OsixthreeO is a bold attempt to straddle the gap between user empowerment and option diarrhea.

OsixthreeO’s customizer controls are fairly comprehensive but kept to the necessary minimum and organized in a way that fits with the default WordPress controls. That’s the goal anyways.

What About Page Builders?

OsixthreeO will not force a layout on you. A sidebar layout (left, right, no sidebar) can be selected separately for the Homepage, Pages, Posts, Archives (blog, categories, tags, authors) and Search.

Pages have a Full-Bleed and a Blank template available as well. Full Bleed has the header and footer but no padding or margining in the content area. The Blank template is… blank! No header or footer BUT with all the usual WordPress hooks and such. These come in handy if you are using a page builder.

One area the WP Block editor doesn’t give access to (yet) is the Custom Header.

The custom header functions have been around a while and were showcased on the TwentySeventeen default WordPress theme.

OsixthreeO adds several custom header controls that allow you to make use of this area in several ways.

Many themes provide unlimited font selection on every aspect of the site.

This seems like a recipe for page-load disaster to me. FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text) is a thing. For example if you are loading 3, 4 or more Google fonts on a page, FOUT will happen. Maybe not at home on your 12G network into 16G ram on the 3’x6′ monitor but elsewhere for sure, on crappy devices, crappy networks, basically everywhere else in the world.

sixthreeO will let you choose up to 3 fonts. If you can’t get it done with three you’ll have to do the Child Theme thing or grab the OsixthreeO Hooks Interface plugin.

Give this theme a shot! Play around with the custom header. Monkey around in the code with a child theme. Have fun. Perhaps leave a review.

Customizer Controls