Exhale Theme Beta

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been hard at work at building my latest WordPress theme. I’ve used the techniques that I’ve learned and system that I built over the past year to knock this out in a relatively quick manner. But, the idea has been with me for this theme since I redesigned my personal blog last year.

Exhale, for me, represents everything that most other WordPress themes are not–a sigh of relief.

I wanted to build something that didn’t have unnecessary features. I wanted it to be a way for a user to simply plug in their content and have it appear on the front end of their site without any distractions getting in the way. And, I wanted to allow users to simply create awesome things.

The Beta Testing Period

Right now, the plan is for a quick, two-week beta run with a version 1.0.0 release sometime in the first week of April. I’ll be sending out near-daily updates during this phase.

It’s safe enough to use on a live site if you don’t mind living on the edge. I’m using it right here on ThemeHybrid.com, which should also help me work out any quirks.

If you sign up during this beta trial, you can snag a sweet $10 off by using the EXHALEBETA coupon code at checkout.

Theme Features

Exhale is a scaled-back theme in terms of fancy gizmos. With most Internet traffic worldwide coming from mobile, there’s no need for all the extras. This theme was designed specifically for the modern Web user.

Design Options

Out of the box, there are several color and font options that will allow you to fully personalize your site. You can pretty much skin it any way you want.

Child Themes

Speaking of skins, I’m already working on a dark child theme that I hope will be available soon after the launch of this theme. Maybe even at the same time.

Performance Options

I broke a few of my own rules and decided to add some settings for disabling a few WordPress features, such as the emoji JavaScript (not needed on modern browsers), embed JavaScript, and admin toolbar. Because these things affect the front end performance, I felt like they worked as theme options. But, they’re simply options and can be enabled/disabled at your leisure.

404 Page Design

There’s also an option for selecting and building out your own 404 error page. No more boring default messages that a theme might output. You can go all out and customize this to your heart’s content with the WordPress editor.

Gutenberg-ready

I primarily designed this theme around the Gutenberg editor. Currently, it requires at Gutenberg 5.2+ for the styles to apply correctly on the backend.

If you’re still going with the old-school, classic editor, that’s cool too. There’s even a theme option to use a classic-optimized stylesheet on the front end without all the block styles.

Breathe A Sigh Of Relief With Exhale

If you care about getting your message across to your site’s visitors, you owe it to yourself to use this theme.

Want to know more? Check out the Exhale theme page →