The WordPress Themes Team has launched a new block theme called Stacks as part of its Community Themes initiative. The aim is to bring together team representatives to build block themes year-round, similar to how default themes are built and officially supported.
Stacks was specifically designed to create slide decks for presentations. It was built by Saxon Fletcher with the help of Automattic-sponsored contributor Ben Dwyer.
The theme has a simple setup flow. Once Stacks is installed and the user clicks on “Customize,” they are taken to the Site Editor where a set of five slides is already pre-filled on the home page in a warm and inviting color palette.
Slides can also be created on any post or page using the “Stacks” pattern. After creating a new page, the user is presented with the option to start the page by inserting the Stacks pattern. This loads the same five sample slides that are included on the home page by default. They can be easily edited so that any page or post contains its own unique slide deck.
The Stacks theme is mobile-friendly, making it easy to follow along from different devices. While it was built for a small niche use case, people who want to host their own slides, it presents an interesting use of the block editor for creating slides. Some users may find this to be more user-friendly than working with a third-party application to build their presentations.
Since a different deck can be hosted on each page or post, someone who wants to create a website devoted entirely to hosting their own slide presentations could easily save them all in the same place, share links to the different decks, and avoid having to use a hosted service that may not be around forever.
Stacks is available for free on WordPress.org, and users can expect these Community Themes to have some level of support as they are being hosted by the official WordPress.org account.
