Themes and Blueprints

The site’s Theme page is a workbench for blueprints: editable copies of a theme that you can keep, reuse, and share. This page explains the three columns, the three editing tabs, and which blueprint the build actually uses.

What a blueprint is

A blueprint is one editable copy of a theme, made either from a bundled theme or from this site’s current theme. It is a snapshot: it does not change when the theme it was copied from changes.

Blueprints appear in three columns.

Column	Who sees it	Notes
Account	every seat on the account that owns this site	shared
Site	this site only	this site’s own fork, at most one
User	you, on every account you belong to	private

The Site column is different from the other two. It holds this site’s fork of the active theme, created with Fork the active theme. It has no name of its own, and it cannot be renamed or set as the site default, because while it exists it already outranks everything else.

The tiles

Each blueprint is a tile. The thumbnail is a small mock page painted with that blueprint’s own palette, read live from its static/style.css :root block. Both the light and the dark palette are rendered and toggled by CSS alone: your admin colour mode picks one, and hovering or focusing the tile flips to the other. A blueprint with no readable palette shows a neutral template glyph instead.

Two markers matter and they are independent:

A primary coloured ring means “this is the blueprint you are currently editing below”.
A star means “this is what the site builds with”.

Long names scroll on hover rather than being cut off. Tiles are ordinary buttons, so Enter and Space select them.

Right click a tile (or long press on touch) to open its menu:

Duplicate, a submenu that asks where the copy should land: Account, Site, or User. Duplicating into Site copies the blueprint into this site’s own fork, so it is offered only when the site does not already have one, and never on the fork itself.
Rename, on blueprints only. The site fork has no name of its own.
Set as site default, on Account blueprints only, or Clear site default on whichever blueprint currently holds the star.
Delete, after a separator, in the destructive style.

Duplicating the site fork into Account or User is a slightly different action: because the fork has no id of its own, WordPuppi opens the create dialog pre-named Something copy and copies the site’s current theme.

Column menus and headers

The empty area of a column has its own right click menu. In Account and User it offers New blueprint with the scope already fixed to that column. In Site it offers Fork the active theme, disabled with an explanation when a fork already exists.

The Site column header carries the bundled theme picker: the dropdown that chooses which bundled theme this site builds from. It is disabled while the site has a fork, so discard the fork to switch bundled themes again.

A single New blueprint button sits at the far right of the header row. That one opens the dialog with the scope still up to you.

Which one the build uses

The precedence is fixed and it is worth memorising:

the site’s own fork, if one exists
the applied blueprint (the starred one, stored as account_theme_id on the site’s settings)
the bundled theme named in the site’s settings

That is why “Set as site default” is not offered on the fork, and why the bundled theme dropdown in Settings, Generation pauses itself and explains which of the two is shadowing it.

Creating a blueprint

The create dialog asks for a name, and for whichever of these the launcher did not already decide:

Belongs to, shown only when the scope is still open (the header button). Opening it from a column menu fixes the scope to that column.
Copy from, a bundled theme, shown when the source is a bundled theme. It defaults to the site’s active theme, and the name follows your choice until you type your own.

Launching it from the site fork’s Duplicate copies this site’s current theme instead, and there is no source picker.

The new blueprint is selected as soon as it is created, so you can start editing it immediately.

Editing a blueprint

The selected blueprint opens in a three tab workbench, beside a preview pane.

Fonts and Colors

A guided editor over the blueprint’s main stylesheet (static/style.css by convention, otherwise the first .css under static/). It reads the :root custom properties and surfaces every --color-* as a colour picker and every --font-* as a font select, with a live sample page rendering the current values.

Light and dark are edited separately, chosen with a segmented control, because the palette lives in two blocks: the light :root and the dark @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) :root. Saving splices each block independently and byte preserves everything you did not touch. Seven curated font stacks are offered (system sans, system mono, serif, humanist sans, geometric sans, rounded, slab serif).

If the blueprint has no stylesheet under static/, the tab tells you so and points at Custom Files.

Standard Files

The files inherited from the theme the blueprint was copied from. A file tree grouped by directory on the left, an editor on the right. .html files open in the Tera editor; everything else opens in a plain monospace editor. Binary files are not editable here.

Custom Files

The files you added yourself. Same workbench, plus a New file button. Paths are relative to the theme root, for example templates/partials/hero.html.

Cmd S (or Ctrl S) saves the open file. Navigating away with unsaved edits, including selecting a different blueprint, opens a confirm dialog first.

The preview pane

Build preview builds the site from your saved files and renders one real page: the homepage if you have one, otherwise the newest published post, otherwise an honest placeholder telling you to publish something. If the file you are editing has unsaved changes, the preview says so before it builds.

When the blueprint you are editing is not the one the site builds with, the pane notes that too: the preview shows the site’s active theme, not your selection.

Sites and Settings for the bundled theme picker and the build controls
Publishing and Custom Domains for getting a rebuilt theme onto the web