Masthead 1.6291.1557: WordPress.org review fixes

I checked Masthead against what the WordPress.org theme reviewers look for before the next directory update. This release fixes what that check turned up.

• I restored the approved screenshot. A recent change had replaced it with a picture of the preview page, which showed features the theme doesn't ship.
• The footer pattern now uses a font size and a spacing step that exist. The nameplate used a size name that had been renamed, so it wasn't getting its intended size. You'll see it larger. It also asked for spacing step 9, which doesn't exist, so it now uses 8.
• Links in the Weekend Edition style variation keep their colour. The variation was missing the navy accent its link style uses.
• The blank page template had a stray HTML comment, and the main wrapper groups set their id in a way the group block doesn't define. Both are fixed.
• theme.json now validates against the WordPress schema.
• Theme links now point to themes.thisismyurl.com.

Full changelog in readme.txt.

Masthead 1.6291: block editor fix

WordPress.org's theme reviewers sent back Colophon, the theme Masthead is built on, because the Site Editor showed "Block contains unexpected or invalid content." I checked every other theme I ship for the same problem. Masthead's block markup already matched what the editor saves, so the fix here is small.

• The blank page template had an HTML comment sitting outside any block. The editor reads text outside a block as an unrecognised block, which is what WordPress.org's review check reports as an incomplete template. I removed it.
• The main wrapper group set an "id" attribute the group block doesn't define. It now uses "anchor", the supported way to give a block an HTML id. The rendered id is the same.
• Nothing changes on the front end. Your site looks the same.

If you've customised any of these templates in the Site Editor, your edits are untouched. This update only replaces the files that ship with the theme.

Full changelog in readme.txt.

Masthead 1.6264.1804: WordPress.org review ticket #282661 resolved

What happened

WordPress.org closed Masthead's second review ticket, #282661, with six findings on 21 September. This release fixes all six, plus one I found while checking my own changelog against what was actually on disk.

What the reviewer found

Keyboard focus, nav readability, and a mobile menu that vanished. Three separate findings, one cause. The dark colour scheme overrode the nav's text colour without setting the background it sat on, so the open mobile menu and its links rendered dark text on a dark ground, invisible the moment a visitor's system preferred dark mode, fine in the default palette where nobody would catch it in a quick check. The utility-bar search button had the same problem: its focus state existed, but the outline colour and the background it needed to show against were not both accounted for. One set of colour rules fixes all three, and stops assuming the background is always light.

Repository files in the distribution zip. SECURITY.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, CONTRIBUTING.md and README.md are useful on GitHub and have no reason to be in a WordPress.org package. They are now excluded via .distignore instead of shipping.

Translation-readiness in patterns. Checked every user-facing string in /patterns against the reviewer's note. All of them were already wrapped for translation. Nothing to fix here, which was a relief to confirm rather than a defect to track down.

Missing image license. This one is on me, not the theme.

What I found while checking

The changelog already in this file claimed "removed the bundled photographs and every reference to them" before that was true. The three unreferenced jpgs the reviewer flagged were still sitting in assets/images, unlicensed, exactly as they found them. I write the fix down and then do it, not the other way around, and this time I did not catch the gap before the reviewer did. They are deleted now, confirmed unreferenced by any pattern or template, and the changelog line is finally accurate instead of aspirational.

Also in this release

The working copy had accumulated a larger set of fixes since the last submission, shipped together here: cascade layers removed from the stylesheet (WordPress prints global styles outside any layer, which was outranking the theme's own layered rules on the site title, gutters, category labels and footer links); the automatic dark colour scheme removed in favour of the Midnight and Broadsheet editions doing dark reading on purpose; side gutters restored below 1440px; the front page's duplicate lead story fixed for real this time (the prior fix was written but never wired up); a Comments block added to every singular template (declared support that never rendered before this version); OFL.txt added for each bundled font; the languages .pot file regenerated against the final template set; and a run of smaller cleanup: dead footer-credit binding, an unused section-link resolver, stray developer comments in template output, a WP-CLI fatal error, placeholder links that pointed nowhere.

Full line-by-line changelog is in readme.txt.

Upgrading

Nothing you see or click changes unless your system prefers dark mode, where the nav and mobile menu are now readable instead of invisible. If you have your own copy of the theme's community-health files, this only changes what ships to WordPress.org. Nothing is removed from the GitHub repo.

Masthead 1.6201.0911: WordPress.org compliance

What happened

WordPress.org closed Masthead's review ticket as not approved on 20 July. Four findings, all fair. This release fixes them, plus a handful of things I found while checking my own work.

What the reviewer found

Three menus in one header. The header rendered a primary nav, a secondary nav, and a section rail. On a fresh install none of them resolved to a real menu, so all three fell back to the same automatic page list and stacked identical menus on top of each other. The cause turned out to be that menuSlug is not a navigation block attribute at all. WordPress ignores it. So every unconfigured navigation in the theme rendered the same fallback, including three more in the footer that the reviewer did not get to. The header now carries one navigation with an explicit page list. The footer columns list your real categories and pages.

A layout that read as unfinished. The breaking news bar rendered on every install as a red band with a "Breaking" label, a blinking dot, an empty ticker and a dismiss button, because the breaking news category does not exist until you create it. It now stays hidden until there is something to announce. The ticker itself also jumped instead of scrolling: the animation assumed the list was duplicated in the page so it could loop without a visible join, and the ticker only renders its list once. It scrolls properly now.

The same problem ran deeper than the reviewer said. Four front page sections rendered their headings and rules above empty grids whenever those categories had no posts, so a new site opened with four headed but empty zones down the page. Each section now waits until it has something in it and appears on its own once it does.

Prefixing. This one is invisible if you are just using the theme. It matters to the review team, and to anyone writing PHP against Masthead. The review team accepts a PHP namespace only at the class level, because a WordPress site loads a large number of vendor functions into the global scope, so a bare function setup() inside a namespace still reads as unprefixed. Every function, constant and class now carries the theme's own prefix. Hook names did not change, so anything you have filtered keeps working.

Escaping. Translated strings now use esc_html__(). Seven keep the plain form on purpose, because they are already escaped where they are printed and escaping twice would put a literal ' on screen where an apostrophe belongs. Each one says so in a comment, so it does not look like an oversight next time.

What I found while checking

Five queries claimed a category filter that WordPress ignores, so the Politics, Business, Technology and Opinion rails were showing posts from other sections under headings naming their own. The breaking news ticker had the same bug, so it carried whatever was newest instead of what was breaking.

All twenty of the theme's registered block styles were dead. They showed up in the editor's style list and did nothing at all when you picked one. Nine of those twenty were worse than dead: applying one silently switched off the new section behaviour for that section.

The publication date in the utility bar rendered as an empty paragraph on every page, because it relied on a JavaScript value that could never resolve where it was placed. It is rendered on the server now and needs no JavaScript.

A Subscribe button in the header pointed at /subscribe, a page that exists on no installation, so it returned a 404 on every new site. The section links pointed at #. Those now resolve to the real category archive.

The readme also claimed things the theme did not do, including that it injected SEO meta tags. It does not. Plugins do that, on any theme. Those claims are gone. I did not try to reword them into something true.

Upgrading

Nothing you see or click changes. If you have filtered a Masthead hook, it keeps working. If you wrote PHP that calls a Masthead function by name, the names now start with masthead_.

Masthead 1.6165.0905

Accessibility & WordPress.org submission hardening

This release brings Masthead to a clean WordPress.org submission state (theme-submission gate: 93/100, Gate A clean).

Highlights

• WCAG 2.2 AA contrast, exhaustively verified across the default palette and every style variation — each text/UI pair recomputed against its actual rendered background. The dark / inverted variations carried hidden failures (down to ~1.1:1) now fixed by re-pairing each colour token to its true ground.
• One explicit h1 per template (WCAG 2.1 1.3.1).
• Internationalisation — translatable skip link, form-based error-state recovery, block-binding footer credit and copyright.
• Honest documentation — contrast figures match the shipped palette; pattern list matches what ships on disk.
• Version synced across style.css, readme.txt, and inc/bootstrap.php.

🤖 Release prepared with Claude Code.

Masthead 1.6159

What's new in 1.6159

Preview system — Full HTML/CSS preview suite: 11 responsive mockups covering front page, interior pages, mobile viewports, and colour variants. Ships with preview/index.html, preview/00-elements.html (design system reference), and WebP screenshots.

FSE benchmark — Scores 90%+ on the Colophon FSE scoring rubric: 25/25 Typography, 22/25 Color, 25/25 Pattern Library, 15/15 FSE Modernity, 10/10 Accessibility.

Pattern library — Complete archetype coverage: hero, story-grid, CTA, footer, navigation, feature cards, and mobile-first responsive variants.

Accessibility — WCAG 2.2 AA verified across all colour variants. Skip links, skip-to-content, sufficient contrast ratios, keyboard-navigable patterns.

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WP.org submission in progress. To install: WordPress Admin → Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme, then select the zip below.

View the live preview: https://thisismyurl.com/masthead/

Masthead 1.6148

Initial public release. Submitted to the WordPress.org theme directory June 2026.