It was about time for a Stargazer theme update. We’ve enjoyed a good stretch of stable code for a while now. In the meantime, I’ve learned new techniques and have come up with better ways of doing things.

That’s what this update is all about. More than anything, this is a housecleaning for the theme.

What’s changed?

Primarily, I updated Stargazer to the latest and most updated version of the Hybrid Core framework. There were tons of improvements to the Hybrid Core code base late last year. I’m happy to be able to bring those into the theme.

The most obvious user-facing changes are going to be with the customizer and editor. In the customizer, I created a separate “Theme Options” panel that houses any theme-specific options. In the editor, I’ve removed the stylesheet integration in favor of integrating with the Gutenberg plugin, which will be the editor that is shipped with WordPress 5.0.

And, frankly, I say good riddance. Editor styles were one of the most troublesome aspects of theme development.

If you still want your editor styles, you might stick around on Stargazer 3.0.0 for a while, at least until WP 5.0 is out and the new editor is in core.

For child theme authors, you shouldn’t have to worry about too much. Just give your child themes a test and make sure they’re working. You’ll probably want to get rid of your editor styles that were auto-loaded by Stargazer (they are no longer). You might also want to register some custom colors with Gutenberg (I’ll post a tutorial on doing that soon).

For all other changes, feel free to peruse the online change log.

Download

If you already have Stargazer installed, you should see an update soon in your WordPress admin. If you don’t, simply do a search for stargazer via the Themes page in your admin.

You can also grab a copy of the theme via WordPress.org, GitHub, or the Stargazer theme page.