WordPress Block Themes
Dirtbag 🛻
A super-simple WordPress block theme built on good bones and road grit — a lean utility vehicle for tinkering and practical self-education.
Do More With Less
Dirtbag is for people who want to learn WordPress theme design and front-end development by stripping down to fundamentals and building up from there. It favours plain HTML markup, as little CSS and JS as possible, core WordPress blocks, the fonts everyone already has, visible feeds, and old open-web habits over front-end machinery.
Out of the box it is a plain, unstyled, brutalist foundation with a 1990s view-source feel, packaged with Web 1.0-inspired page templates, block patterns, and six global styles: Amber CRT, Blueprint (or BSOD), Hi-vis (No-Name), Minimalist, Newspaper, and Terminal. Unlike the default no-style style, those variations open the door to the full powers of the site editor if you want to go there.
The constraints are the curriculum. No build step — edit files, run the package check, ship. No theme-authored JavaScript — core blocks may still load WordPress’s own Interactivity API, each with a plain-HTML fallback. No enqueued theme stylesheet — style.css carries the theme header and is otherwise empty, with styling handled through theme.json. WordPress core already prints global styles, layout, block styles, and the scripts core blocks need; Dirtbag avoids redoing what core or the browser does for you.
Repository Details
- Owner
- @dknauss
- Source
- dknauss/Dirtbag
- WordPress.org
- WordPress.org · Live Demo
- Latest release
- v0.1.17
- CI
- GitHub Actions
- License
- GPL-2.0-or-later
- Try It! →
- 🛝 WordPress Playground
- Last updated
- Primary language
- PHP
- Stars
- 4
Small, simple, durable, accessible, and understandable — a block theme you can read end to end, listed in the WordPress.org theme directory with a live static demo and Playground blueprints.
Documentation
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| README | What the theme is, what it refuses to do, and how to get it running. |
| Style Variations | The six global styles — Amber CRT, Blueprint, Hi-vis, Minimalist, Newspaper, and Terminal — and how they are built. |
| Philosophy Audit | The theme measured against its own stated principles, with the places it falls short named. |
| Open-Web Site Files | Templates and docs for RSS, OPML, XFN, h-card, rel=me, now pages, and plain-text site-root files. |
| Static Export to GitHub Pages | How the backend-free demo site is crawled from WordPress and deployed as static files. |
| Development | Local setup, the package check, and the contribution workflow. |
