New Design Option: Twenty Twenty-Three Blue

There is a new WordPress theme available on the Toastmost service, and I’m trying it out on the Online Presenters website.

Instead of displaying member options in the sidebar, this theme shows a custom menu in the upper right corner of the page with a prompt for members to sign up for roles (logging in first, if necessary). Once a member is logged in, they will see links to edit their profile and update their profile picture.

Members who have forgotten their password will also see the link to reset their password in that spot.

Other features of this design:

• Site title and tagline are displayed with the selected featured image for the home page in the background.
• A similar layout with the title of a blog post, web page, or event overlaid on a featured image is available as an alternate template you can select within the WordPress editor.
• Several other layout template choices are available within the editor when this theme is selected, for example a full-width page template for content that needs to spread out (see illustration below).
• This is one of the new “block theme” designs, meaning you can make changes to the basic page and post layout templates without coding (more on that below).

The option to choose Twenty Twenty-Three Blue now appears on the Toastmost website signup form …

… and on the administration screen for switching themes, on an existing website.

Mobile friendly

As is generally true of WordPress themes that adhere to the latest standards, Twenty Twenty-Three reformats automatically to make your site fit within the dimensions of a mobile phone screen.

Changing the template for a page, post, or event

The layout of any WordPress document will be determined by a template bundled with the theme, but you can switch from the default template to another one bundled with the theme. Clicking on the link for the default template will display a pop-up dialog box from which you can choose any of the available templates.

Editing block theme templates

If you do not like the default templates, you have the option of changing them. Like the Twenty Twenty-Three TM theme, Twenty Twenty-Three Blue is a “block theme,” meaning that its templates are defined as a set of editable content blocks. Prior to the latest generation of WordPress themes, making choices like that required more technical skill.

If you click on “Edit Site” rather than “Edit Page,” on the black bar menu that appears when you’re logged in as the website administrator, you will launch the Site Editor. The Site Editor allows you to edit templates such as the one for a single blog post (shown below).

You can also edit “Template Parts,” like Header and Footer that are embedded in multiple templates.

Although you can use standard blocks like Heading, Paragraph, Image within a template, they make greater use of placeholder blocks like Post Title, Post Content, and Featured Image.

The most important thing every webmaster whose club uses one of these themes should learn to do within the Site Editor is edit the main navigation menu that will help visitors to your website find their way around. How to do that is explained in this knowledge base article.

However, even if you don’t immediately want to make more elaborate changes to your website layout, it’s good to know you can if you ever need to. My only caution is that the out-of-the-box Toastmost themes are designed to comply with the Toastmasters International brand manual, in terms of things like color choices. Please don’t make wild changes that will get the brand police mad at both of us.