Modernize theme for WordPress 7.1: theme.json, block.json registration, and the missing templates

[mark-iid]

Brings the theme up to current WordPress practice. It ran fine on WP 7.1 before this, but architecturally it was a pre-5.9 classic theme: no theme.json, no editor styles, dead block code, and a !important layer fighting the cascade instead of participating in it.

Six commits, each self-contained and reviewable on its own.

The main change: theme.json replaces the nuclear CSS

The theme had no theme.json, so WordPress emitted its default Global Styles and the theme fought back — 186 !important declarations in norton.css, plus norton_nuclear_css(), ~250 lines of duplicated rules injected at wp_head priority 999. Both are gone.

theme.json (v3) now declares the palette, typography, spacing scale, layout sizes and the link/heading/button element styles, and switches off the core presets and custom colour pickers that caused the conflicts. Colours reach CSS as --wp--preset--* custom properties.

The stylesheet splits so the editor can share it:

File	Scope
norton-components.css	Design tokens + box/alert/table chrome (shared with editor)
norton.css	Front-end layout, header, nav, sidebar, footer
editor-style.css	Block editor canvas adjustments

Neither stylesheet contains a single !important.

add_theme_support('editor-styles') gives the block editor the theme's look. WordPress 7.0 stopped passing classic themes any post-editor styling, so without this the canvas is plain white.

Blocks: block.json was dead code

blocks/*/block.json and render.php existed but nothing loaded them. inc/blocks.php registered the same three blocks from inline PHP arrays with no render_callback, and blocks.js registered them a third time client-side with its own save(). The three definitions disagreed — that's how blocks fail validation on re-edit.

block.json is now the single source of truth. Blocks are dynamic: save() serialises only inner blocks, render.php emits the wrapper via get_block_wrapper_attributes(), so the align/anchor/spacing supports actually apply — and future markup changes reach existing posts without re-saving them.

Unreachable features

• Pagination — neither index.php nor archive.php called the_posts_pagination(). Past page one there was no way to navigate.
• Comments — the theme declared html5 support for comment-form and comment-list but shipped no comments.php and never called comments_template().
• Search — results fell through to index.php with no heading, so you couldn't see what you'd searched for.

Accessibility

.screen-reader-text was used by the read-more links but never defined in CSS, so post titles rendered visibly as [READ MORE "My Post Title"]. That's a visible rendering bug, not just an a11y one. Fixed, plus a skip link and a :focus-visible ring. Also dropped cursor: default !important on html body *, which was removing the text caret from inputs.

The nav walker is deleted, not patched

It existed only to strip <ul>/<li>, and in doing so dropped submenus entirely, plus aria-current, menu item classes, and target/rel/title. Core's Walker_Nav_Menu provides all of that. The DOS menu-strip look is now CSS — submenus drop on hover and :focus-within, and stack inline on mobile. The hand-rolled fallback became wp_page_menu() so it emits matching markup.

Housekeeping

• footer.php used PHP date(), which reads the server timezone rather than the site's — now wp_date()
• error_log() fired on every init, filling the site error log indefinitely; console.log() fired in every editor session
• style.css declares Requires at least / Tested up to / Requires PHP
• load_theme_textdomain() + languages/norton-simple.pot, so translation-ready is now true
• defined( 'ABSPATH' ) || exit; on every PHP file
• Redundant role="main" / role="complementary" removed
• CI Node 20 → 24 (Node 20 hit EOL April 2026)

Testing

Verified against a real WordPress 7.1 + MariaDB instance driven by wp-cli and headless Chrome, not just by reading the diff:

• All templates return 200 with zero PHP diagnostics under WP_DEBUG — home, single, page, paged, search, 404, feed
• All three blocks register at apiVersion 3 with render callbacks; theme.json parses as v3 and emits every custom property
• Editor canvas computes navy background, white text, Courier, and .norton-box at 20px padding with the bevel border — editor and front end match
• The built zip installs into a clean WordPress via wp theme install and renders identically

That testing caught a real bug introduced in this branch: a CSS comment reading blocks/*/render.php had its */ close the comment early, making the parser swallow the next rule and silently drop all padding and margin from .norton-box and .norton-box-invert. Both stylesheets lint clean and every PHP file parses, so nothing static would have flagged it — only the rendered page showed it. Fixed in bf3d336.

Reviewer notes

Two behaviour changes worth a decision:

1. theme.json restricts the palette to the Norton colours — color.custom and gradients are off. That's what lets the CSS drop !important. Any existing block where someone picked an arbitrary colour will fall back to the palette. Easy to re-enable if that's not wanted.
2. Existing posts using the old blocks — saved markup still parses, but worth checking one real post before merging.

Also beyond the original scope, flagged for a call: search.php is new, and package-lock.json is now tracked (CI runs npm install; build.js already excludes it from the shipped theme).

I did not claim the accessibility-ready tag — the work here would likely pass, but that tag carries a formal wordpress.org audit and none was run.