توثيق Civic Brief

Installation

Download civic-brief.zip from this page, then from your WordPress dashboard go to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme. Choose the file you downloaded and click Install Now. Leave the .zip exactly as it came — do not unpack it first. WordPress expects the archive, not a loose folder, and an unzipped upload will be rejected with an unhelpful error.

When the upload finishes, click Activate on the confirmation screen, or find Civic Brief under Appearance → Themes and activate it from there. Your existing pages, posts, and media are untouched by the switch. Civic Brief is a block theme, so the moment it is active the Customizer is gone and every design control moves to Appearance → Editor.

Nothing else is required to finish the install. Civic Brief bundles no plugins, asks for no licence key, no account, and no activation step, and sends no data anywhere. It is GPL-2.0, and the version you downloaded is the whole theme.

Getting started

Set your site identity first. Go to Appearance → Editor, open the header template part, and select the Site Title or Site Logo block. Upload your organisation's logo there and confirm the site title reads the way you want it read aloud — screen readers announce it on every page, so an abbreviation nobody recognises is worse than the full name.

Second, build your navigation. Still in the header template part, select the Navigation block and add your pages: what you do, who you help, how to give, how to get in touch. Keep it to five or six items. A nonprofit menu that lists every programme separately buries the two links most visitors actually came for.

Third, decide what the home page is. Under Settings → Reading, choose a static page and assign it, or leave it on your latest posts if updates are the point of the site. Then open that page in the editor and drop in the call-to-action and updates patterns described below rather than building the layout from empty blocks.

Calls to action and updates

Civic Brief ships call-to-action patterns written in plain language. Insert one from the editor's block inserter under the Patterns tab, then replace the placeholder text with your own. Resist the urge to make the wording clever — "Donate" and "Volunteer with us" outperform anything abstract, and they are also what a screen reader announces when a visitor tabs onto the button.

The theme does not process payments and does not bundle a donation plugin, which is deliberate: money handling belongs in a plugin or with your payment provider, not in a theme you might swap out later. Point the button in the call-to-action pattern at your donation page — whether that is a page on your own site or a hosted checkout — and the pattern works as intended.

There is also an events and updates pattern for the things a civic organisation needs to publish on a schedule: meeting dates, programme news, board notices. Insert it on a page or your home page and edit the entries directly. Write dates out in full rather than as digits alone, so the meaning survives being read aloud.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the reason this theme exists, and most of it needs nothing from you. Civic Brief renders a skip link so keyboard users can jump past the navigation, marks up header, main, article, and footer as real landmarks, and draws a visible focus outline using :focus-visible with a plain :focus fallback for older browsers. Every interactive element shows where the keyboard is.

Both the light and dark palettes were built to pass WCAG AA contrast on every text and background pairing, and no colour in the theme is used as the only signal for anything. If a state matters, it is also carried by text, a shape, or an underline, so a visitor who cannot distinguish the colours still gets the information.

One thing you can undo: changing palette colours under Styles will not stop you from picking a pair that fails contrast. If you replace the theme colours with your organisation's brand colours, check the resulting text-on-background combinations before you publish. Brand palettes are frequently designed for print and fail on screen.

Customizing

Everything visual lives at Appearance → Editor. The Templates list holds the page layouts — home, single post, page, archive, search, 404 — and editing one changes every page that uses it. If you only want to change a single page, edit the page itself instead; the template is for site-wide changes.

Template Parts hold the pieces shared across templates, mainly the header and the footer. Editing the header template part once updates the header everywhere. This is where your logo, navigation, and footer contents live, and it is where the credit line sits if you want to remove it.

The Styles panel, reached from the brush icon in the editor, controls colours, typography, and spacing globally. Browse styles shows any style variations included with the theme, and one click swaps the whole palette. Typography is fluid — sizes scale with the viewport through clamp() values in theme.json — so text stays readable on a phone without you setting per-device sizes.

Civic Brief uses system font stacks only. There are no Google Fonts and no CDN requests, which means the theme makes zero external network calls and loads nothing from a third party. Adding a webfont is possible, but you would be trading that privacy and speed for it, so decide deliberately rather than by habit.

Removing the credit

The footer carries a small "Theme by Odie Themes" line. You are free to remove it. The theme is GPL-2.0, the credit is not a licence condition, and deleting it disables nothing, breaks no feature, and triggers no nag screen. Anyone who tells you otherwise about a GPL theme is selling something.

To remove it, go to Appearance → Editor → Patterns, open Template Parts, and click Footer. Select the paragraph containing the credit, open the block's three-dot options menu, and choose Delete. Click Save. That is the whole job — three clicks and a save, and it stays gone through theme updates because your edit is stored in the database, not in the theme files.

If you would rather keep it, it helps. The link is dofollow and it is roughly the only way people find these themes, since there is no marketing budget behind them. But that is a favour, not a requirement, and a nonprofit footer that needs to stay clean should stay clean.