I made this theme to use for my personal site…back in 2014. Maybe 2015. WordPress and the web in general has changed a lot since then, but this thing is still solid, if you know how to use it. Here’s what I would do, if I were going to use this theme today:

  • Use this plugin for open graph integration (nice card view when you text/post/share a page/post)
  • The Home page shows the latest post (not page). If you use a featured image in the post, that will show, otherwise, a beautiful gradient will be the circle background.
  • For best results, set your media sizes as: Thumbnail- 300 x 300 (crop to exact), Medium-1000 x 1000, Large 2000 x 2000. No worries if you’ve already sized things differently, update your media settings, install the Regenerate Thumbnail Plugin and batch resize them all.
  • There are no post types, other than a standard post
  • The “sidebar” is shown before the footer on this site (gray background area, below). You can customize this via “appearance>widgets” in WordPress.
  • If a page has children, they will show on the parent page ONLY if that parent has the “show children” page template activated.
  • If you use a “featured image” (not required) it will show as a page thumbnail, otherwise a gray circle will appear.
  • If want to use a featured image JUST for the sake of a thumbnail (and not a header/hero image) choose the page template “minimal” (this will hide the featured image on the actual page, and also hide the sidebar).
  • There’s only so much room: set a primary menu (in appearance) you can put as many things in as you want, but I’d suggest limiting it to five. This is a philosophy AND design decision. It’ll force you to be brief.
  • Here’s an example of a page with a featured image (if no featured image is chosen, no big deal, page content will just start below the title)
  • Gaunt is very responsive! Jetpack + Photon could make it even snappier on a mobile view, as could a lazy load plugin. Those are easily installable, so I’ll leave it up to you.
  • There are no plugins required to make Gaunt work.
  • There are no dropdowns/submenus. You can make them all you want in the back end (Appearance: Menu) but they won’t show up.
  • Comments will not show, ever, but you could get a disable comments plugin if you want reinforcement. So don’t use that comment widget.