Ixian

A lean full-site-editing theme for service businesses and SaaS companies.

Description

Ixian is a full-site-editing (FSE) WordPress theme aimed at service businesses and SaaS companies. theme.json and style variations provide the design system; pages are composed from blocks rather than from a large bundled pattern library, with a small set of full-page starter patterns included.

Ixian is forked from Aviendha. It takes Aviendha 1.15.0 as its starting point — the theme.json design system, block templates, template parts and the twilight style variation all come from there — and re-aims it from e-commerce at service and SaaS sites. Aviendha is treated the way Sage is: a versioned base you clone and own. Fixes made to Aviendha do not flow here automatically.

Like Aviendha, Ixian uses Aludra for its blocks. Neither theme registers custom blocks of its own — content blocks come from the shared Aludra plugin (mega menu, carousel, FAQ tabs, pricing tiers, feature cards, and more), which is what WordPress.org's theme-review rules ask for. Aludra is shared across Imagewize's themes, so block and icon work done there benefits Aviendha, Elayne and Ixian alike. (Nynaeve is the exception: it registers its own blocks and does not use Aludra.)

Aludra is recommended but not required — without it Ixian is a plain block theme that works with core blocks.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6+
• PHP 8.0+
• Aludra plugin (recommended, not required)
• WooCommerce (only if you want the store templates)

Installation

composer require imagewize/ixian

On a Bedrock site this installs to web/app/themes/ixian via installer-paths. Otherwise, download a release zip and install it under Appearance → Themes → Add New.

Features

• Design system — theme.json defines the colour palette, typography, spacing and border radii. The colour and spacing slugs match what Aludra's block styles expect (base, contrast, secondary, main, primary, accent, tertiary, border-light), so Aludra blocks pick up the theme's colours without configuration.
• Style variations — see styles/ (e.g. twilight.json) for alternate palettes on top of the same design system.
• Two page templates — page.html (default) omits post-title, since most pages get their title from a block's own heading; page-with-title.html (selectable per page under Page → Template) adds the conventional title treatment.
• WooCommerce, dormant by default — the theme ships store templates (single-product, archive-product, product-search-results, coming-soon) plus add-to-cart layouts in parts/. All of it is guarded by class_exists( 'WooCommerce' ): with the plugin inactive, the store templates and the header's mini cart are filtered out rather than left to render as unsupported blocks. A site that never installs WooCommerce pays nothing for them.
• No JS build step — the theme ships no bundled JavaScript.

Structure

ixian/
├── style.css           # Theme header and the CSS theme.json cannot express
├── theme.json          # Design system: colour, typography, spacing, layout
├── functions.php       # Theme setup, 'menu' template part area, WooCommerce guards
├── templates/          # FSE templates (index, single, page, page-with-title,
│                       #   archive, search, 404, plus WooCommerce store templates)
├── parts/              # header.html, header-dark.html, footer.html, add-to-cart layouts
├── styles/             # Style variations
├── assets/
│   ├── logos/          # Logo mark (SVG)
│   ├── fonts/          # Bricolage Grotesque, JetBrains Mono (variable, self-hosted)
│   └── css/            # WooCommerce override stylesheet (enqueued conditionally)
└── languages/          # Translations (text domain: ixian)

Planning documents and design mockups live in the private imagewize.com repo under docs/ixian/, not here.

Theme Integration for Aludra

Aludra's mega-menu block requires its host theme to register a menu template part area. Ixian does this in functions.php via the default_wp_template_part_areas filter, so mega menu template parts created in the Site Editor appear under Appearance → Editor → Patterns → Template Parts → Menus.

Development

composer install
composer run lint        # php-parallel-lint syntax check
composer run wpcs:scan   # PHPCS against phpcs.xml
composer run wpcs:fix    # PHPCBF auto-fix

Credits

The logo mark is the Font Awesome Free 6.7.2 "robot" icon (CC BY 4.0), obtained via Blade Icons (MIT). Fonts are Bricolage Grotesque and JetBrains Mono, both SIL OFL 1.1. Full attributions are in readme.txt under Third-Party Libraries.

License

GPL v3 or later. See LICENSE.md.