We’re excited to announce the release of Yesterday, our newest WordPress theme — built for writers and personal bloggers who want their words to be the star of the page, not the interface around them.
Yesterday is live now on the WordPress.org theme directory and ready to install on any WordPress site, free of charge.
Why We Built Yesterday
Most blog themes try to do too much. Yesterday does the opposite: a clean, three-column desktop layout, generous whitespace, readable typography, and just enough structure to help readers find what they’re looking for — without ever getting in the way of the writing itself.
What’s Inside
A Reading-First Layout
Yesterday’s signature three-column layout puts your content front and center, with an author rail on the left and a widget sidebar on the right — both collapsing gracefully into a clean single-column stack on mobile.
Automatic Table of Contents
Long posts get an automatic table of contents in the left rail, complete with scroll-spy highlighting so readers always know where they are. Short posts and pages skip the table of contents entirely and show an Author Card instead — the layout adapts to the content, not the other way around.
Nine Post Formats, Fully Styled
Standard, gallery, image, video, audio, quote, link, status, and chat — every WordPress post format gets its own distinct card treatment, so a quick status update looks and feels different from a full essay.
The Author Card Widget
A custom widget built specifically for Yesterday: a photo, name, role or tagline, bio, social links (auto-detected from the URLs you paste in — no icon picking required), and a contact link. Choose vertical or horizontal layout, or let it decide automatically based on where you place it.
Deep, Accessible Navigation
Multi-level dropdown menus that flip open in whichever direction actually fits on screen, fully operable by keyboard — Tab and Shift+Tab move through every item predictably, Escape closes any open menu, and the mobile menu traps focus properly while it’s open, exactly the way accessibility guidelines expect.
A Real Customizer, Not Just Color Swatches
- Colors — three built-in palettes (Slate, Sepia, Forest) plus a full accent-color picker that recolors the whole theme, including automatically-derived hover states.
- Typography — five presets (System, Elegant, Modern, Editorial, and a fully Custom mix-and-match) built on self-hosted Inter, Lora, and Playfair Display — no external font requests, ever.
- Layout — toggle the header search, the post-bottom author box, and sticky sidebars on or off, live, right from the Customizer preview.
A Dedicated About Page
A custom “About / Author” page template with a portrait hero, pulling in your featured image, page title, excerpt, and social links automatically — perfect for an About page that actually looks designed, not bolted on.
Zero External Requests
Every asset — icons, fonts, scripts — ships with the theme and loads from your own server. No CDN dependencies, no third-party font requests, no tracking pixels hiding in the code.
Getting Started
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance → Themes → Add New.
- Search for Yesterday, install, and activate.
- Head to Appearance → Customize to pick a color palette and typography preset.
- Visit Appearance → Widgets to set up your Author Card in the left sidebar.
- Create an About page using the About / Author page template, add a featured image, and write a short excerpt for the hero.
That’s it — no required plugins, no setup wizard, no bloat. Just activate and start writing.
What’s Next
This is version 1.0 — the beginning, not the destination. We’ll be listening closely to feedback from real Yesterday users, and future updates will build on this same principle: every new feature has to earn its place by making the theme better for writers, not just longer on a features list.
Full documentation is available on our Documentation page, and Yesterday’s source is open on GitHub for anyone who wants to look under the hood or contribute.
Try Yesterday today, and let us know what you write with it.
— The eThemeStudio Team
Comments (0)