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Fifty — Wiki

The technical reference for the Fifty monorepo. The repo's README covers the elevator pitch and the live demos; this wiki is the working manual.

Overview

Page	What's in it
How it works	The five-stage theme factory (Ideate → Design → Verify → Self-heal → Ship), end-to-end, plain language + a mermaid diagram. Start here if you're new to the project.

Pipeline — operator docs

These pages are mirrored from docs/ in the repo. They describe the end-to-end flow for shipping one, or many, themes.

Page	When to read
Shipping one theme	Per-theme operator checklist — concept pick → spec → bin/design.py → boot smoke → manual passes → check.py → visual baseline → vision review → promote to shipping → open PR.
Shipping a batch	N-themes-at-once wrapper around the same checklist, driven by bin/design-batch.py --from-concepts. Read this when shipping 5+ themes in one pass.
Blindspot decisions	Landed-on decisions for the six pre-100-themes blind spots (retirement flow, image sourcing, microcopy voice bank, baseline decay, uniqueness cache invalidation, vision-review spend).
Day-0 smoke batch	Honest per-phase timings from hand-shipping 3-5 themes through the pipeline. Calibration baseline for every batch overrun.
Tier-3 deferrals	What was intentionally NOT shipped yet and under what trigger to build it. "Infrastructure without evidence is waste."
FIFTY_AUTO_PAT setup	Maintainer-only — one-time PAT setup for the auto-baseline workflows.

Start here (per-theme reference)

If you want to...	Read
Try a theme in WordPress Playground (one click, no install)	Getting Started
Install a theme into a real WordPress instance	Getting Started → Local install
See every directory and what it does	Project Structure
Run validators, linters, snap-gated builds	Tooling
Drive the visual snapshot framework	Visual Snapshots
Scaffold a brand-new theme variant	Adding a Theme
Understand how to work in this repo as an agent	Working in the Repo

Theme-specific deep dives

These pages were written when Obel was a single-theme repo. They are still accurate for Obel-the-base-theme and remain useful as a deep dive into any single theme's mental model — every variant in the monorepo (Chonk, Selvedge, Lysholm, Foundry, Ember, Basalt, Aero, …) is a clone of Obel and inherits the same architecture.

Page	What's in it
Architecture	Why one theme.json, no JS, no build step. The philosophy behind the structure.
Design Tokens	Every color, spacing, font, and layout token, plus how to read and modify them.
Block Reference	Which core/WC block to use for which job, with the gotchas.
Templates	The full template + part inventory and what each one renders.
Style Variations	How to ship a theme.json variant from a base theme.
WooCommerce Integration	How the themes paint over WC's default chrome.
Recipes	Common tasks (change a color, add a pattern, etc.).
Anti-Patterns	The common mistakes that break the no-CSS / no-JS contract.
Working with LLMs	How to drive Cursor / Claude / ChatGPT against this codebase.
Tooling	CLI reference for everything in bin/.
FAQ	Quick answers to common questions.
Contributing	How to send a PR upstream.