Manuscript WordPress Theme

In 2018, I participated and completed in the annual National Novel Writing Month challenge. That’s NaNoWriMo for short.

While I haven’t attempted to publish that novel or even shown it to another living soul, it was a huge personal victory. I wrote a frickin’ novel! Or, rather, I wrote a first draft of a novel. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

What does all this have to do with WordPress themes?

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question. I’ve wanted to build a theme that was specifically designed for aspiring authors like myself. I was sort of going for a little bit of an old-school typewriter feel with some modern twists. Mostly, I just set out to design something cool that I think other writers would enjoy.

Of course, the theme can be used for anyone’s site. If you like the design, use it. If you want to personalize things such as using custom colors and fonts, you can do that too.

Theme Features

Manuscript is a child theme of the Exhale parent theme, which means it comes with all the features that its parent has.

When I build child themes, I consider them “skins,” which is just a way of saying that the design is different. But, everything under the hood is the same. This means that I can continually improve and maintain the base code without having to re-code several themes.

In this child theme, I wanted to utilize a boxed layout. Previous child themes have all had full-width layouts. The boxed layout allowed me to use a background image.

Headings in the theme use a monospace font (Space Mono) for a typewriter-esque feel. The body copy uses a sans-serif font (Karla) for a more modern mix. I love this combo.

The front page of the demo uses the standard Media & Text block from the core block editor. I’d be happy to write up a quick tutorial if folks want to see that. I thought it’d be a nice touch to pretend I’m actually going to release a book when building out the demo.

Get The Theme

If you’re already a premium member, you can download the theme ZIP file from your account page.

If you’re not a member, what are you waiting for?

Seriously, head over to the Manuscript theme page and make a purchase. You’ll get access to all premium themes and plugins + 1 year of support for $59.95.