A WordPress block theme unlike anything else.
A Boy in the Wild is a serialized, episodic WordPress block theme built around a single ongoing story. Each chapter is a post. Each post has its own visual identity. The content drives the design — not the other way around.
This is not a theme that ships complete. It grows in public, one season at a time.
Most WordPress themes are containers. You pour your content in and hope for the best.
This one works differently.
The design system responds to the story — to the season, the mood, the weight of what is being told. A winter chapter looks and feels nothing like a chapter written in the warmth of late summer. The typography shifts. The palette deepens or opens. The page breathes differently. Rain falls on the pages where it rained. Fire breathes on the pages where there was fire. Contour lines drift slowly through the chapters that carry the heaviest things.
The standard this theme holds itself to: the reader should not feel like they are reading about a place. They should feel like they are in one.
Every chapter reaches for that.
A boy. The wilderness. Mostly true.
He is twelve when the story starts. He is somewhere north of a ridge with no name, in a clearing he has decided is his. He has a fire — adequate, not the largest he has ever made. He has a map he drew from memory, with twelve things named and one location marked deliberately wrong. He has buried something he is not ready to talk about.
The writing is first-person. It is unreliable. There are passages crossed out. There are things he corrects later. There are things he never corrects.
The rest of the story is still being written.
- Full site editing — a WordPress block theme, fully site-editor compatible, built on a single-line template and standalone chapter patterns
- A living design system — block style variations for every season, mood, and narrative arc, each one overriding the colour world of the entire page
- Canvas-based atmospheric effects — rain that falls, fire that breathes, contour lines that drift; all reduced-motion safe
- Chapter patterns — each chapter ships as a pre-built, pre-styled block pattern, ready to publish
- A sealed chapter system — password-protected chapters with keys hidden in the surrounding prose; the reader has to pay attention
- Buried chapters — private entries visible only as a title and dateline; the other notebook
- An easter egg system thirty years deep — ciphers hidden in sketches, numbers that recur across decades, a signature that changes meaning the moment you notice it
- Built to WordPress.org submission standards
New chapters arrive with the seasons. Each one introduces new block patterns and new design directions — new ways the theme can express what the story needs.
The theme is intentionally incomplete at launch. That is not a limitation. That is the point.
Following this theme means following the story. The changelog is the arc.
Early development. The first chapters are in progress. Watch this repository if you want to know when they publish.
Somewhere north of the ridge. Mostly true.