Podbase: add theme

[henriqueiamarino]

Sometimes, your podcast episode cover arts deserve more attention than regular thumbnails offer. If you think so, PodBase is the design for your podcast site.

Demo site

[github-actions[bot]]

Preview changes

I've detected changes to the following themes in this PR: Podbase. You can preview these changes by following the links below:

• Preview changes for Podbase

I will update this comment with the latest preview links as you push more changes to this PR. ⚠️ Note: The preview sites are created using WordPress Playground. You can add content, edit settings, and test the themes as you would on a real site, but please note that changes are not saved between sessions.

[iamtakashi]

• general as the area throws errors. uncategorized should be used for those patterns. When you are there, if you add a title to each, the name will appear nicely in the editor. For example,

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• Does the theme use 'crimson-pro`? If not, let's remove the files and the reference from the JSON file.

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• To be honest, I didn't expect the inverted colour scheme on other templates. It's unique, but I'd probably consider making other templates light-on-dark, like the homepage. It's up to you, just a thought.
• In my opinion, the homepage, the archive, the index, and the search templates could be better if they share a uniform layout. It makes the theme complicated unnecessarily without a huge gain. The differences I noticed were...
  • the grid
  • the size of the featured image
  • the little text "> listen"
  • the vertical alignment between the featured image and the title.

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• We could add the sidebar to the 404 and the page templates, too, maybe?

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• When The "Menu" is clicked on the homepage, we don't see anything because it's light-on-light

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• Should they be buttons? Maybe we don't need the icons... The vertical alignment between the icon and the text seems to be awkward, anyway.

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• This might be intentional, but the pagination seems bare.

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• There is more than one main tag on the archive, the home, the index, the search templates.

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• Since the border in the search block works oddly, I'd remove it.

-- The stylised featured images on the screenshot are cool, but they might give the use a false anticipation.

[henriqueiamarino]

My updates have addressed the following:

• Fixed the template part areas;
• Removed unused Crimson Pro;
• Added a sidebar to 404 — yes, I am sure this is useful here;
• Fixed the Menu link colors
• Removed stroke from Search element

[github-actions[bot]]

Theme-Check results

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podbase: No changes required ✅.

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[henriqueiamarino]

Thanks for your review, @iamtakashi. I am detailing some decisions below:

Inverted Color Scheme This is definitely opinionated, but once I created this system, I couldn't alternate it on variations. It will be constantly inverted, no matter the colors. Since this is a third podcast theme, I want to proceed with a bold approach here; I believe the others (this and this) will follow your expectations closely.

Footer Buttons I added containers to links in the footer to ensure the black icons would work with both backgrounds. Once I have icons, I need such a safe space. This is nice to have as the design is neat and typographical. There are no decorations here, and the icons work to give users a visual break. The icons became a problem once I couldn't use social links because PocketCasts was not there. I am using PNGs with an overlay, but I would love a better solution to remove the button aspect. I tried FontAwesome, an icon font, but it didn't work out.

Query loop designs Following your advice, I've streamlined the variations of QL. Now, there are only two designs: the default and the Homepage version, which showcases the podcast cover in a larger size.

Featured Image The stylized featured images emulate podcast covers. I chose not to use plain images here because that's not how podcasts work. Podcast episodes typically have unique covers uploaded along the audio track; I've done it. Therefore, users of a podcast theme will expect to showcase their art. This is not a false anticipation but a connection to the public's intention.

We're good to move on to the next ones, I believe.

[iamtakashi]

Thanks for your reply and the update. Okay, understood. There is no blocker to launch. Ship it 🚢 !!