Aestazia Child

Aestazia Child is a lightweight, beautifully styled child theme for the Aestazia ClassicPress theme. It introduces a vibrant new color palette, refined typography, enhanced widget areas, a dynamic category color system, a live Customizer design panel, and dedicated page templates to give your site a distinct, modern look while maintaining the robust structural foundation of its parent.

• Vibrant Color System: Replaces the parent theme’s default colors with a striking modern palette (#E34A6F primary, #279D9F secondary, dark accents, and warm highlights), built on a full CSS custom property token system for easy customisation.
• Customizer Design Panel: A dedicated Theme Design panel in the WordPress Customizer groups all visual configuration in one place, with sub-sections for Bootstrap Palette, Typography, Category Colors, and Category Color Application.
• Live Bootstrap Palette Overrides: Override Bootstrap core CSS variables (--bs-primary, --bs-secondary, --bs-body-bg, --bs-body-color, --bs-heading-color, --color-accent) directly from the Customizer without writing any CSS.
• GDPR-Compliant Typography Font Picker: Choose fonts independently for body text, headings H1–H3, and headings H4–H6 from the full Bunny Fonts catalogue (a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Fonts). On Publish, selected fonts are downloaded and served locally from your own uploads directory — no external font requests are ever made to visitors’ browsers. Fonts are applied via CSS custom properties (--font-body, --font-heading-main, --font-heading-sub).
• Category Color System: Assign individual colors to each category directly from the Customizer. Colors are output as scoped CSS variables on .post-card.primary-cat-{slug} elements and can be selectively targeted to card borders, post titles, and Read More links.
• Alternating Post Layout: Archive, search, and home loop views automatically alternate between layout-left and layout-right post card arrangements for a dynamic, magazine-style appearance on wider screens.
• Post Card Layout: Post list views use a two-column card layout — thumbnail on one side, excerpt and Read More link on the other — responsive stack on mobile, side-by-side on sm+ breakpoint.
• Sticky Post Indicator: Sticky posts are marked with a 📌 pin icon appended to the post title in loop views.
• Custom Page Templates: Includes built-in “No Title” templates for both default layout with sidebar and full-width layout, perfect for landing pages and homepages.
• Enhanced Footer Layout: A 3-column widgetized footer area (Footer Column 1, 2, and 3) spanning full width with dedicated styling.
• Refined Typography & UI: Custom styling for blockquotes, tags, badges, buttons, pagination, and code blocks for a polished user experience.
• Accessible Interactions: Clear hover, focus, and active states applied to links, buttons, and form elements.
• Fully Responsive: Inherits the responsive Bootstrap grid system from Aestazia.
• CI Quality Checks: Automated ClassicPress Coding Standards (CPCS) checks run on every commit via GitHub Actions.

• ClassicPress: Version 2.0 or higher (tested up to 2.7.0)
• PHP: Version 8.0 or higher
• Parent Theme: Aestazia must be installed.

1. Make sure the Aestazia parent theme is already installed on your ClassicPress site.
2. Download the latest aestazia-child.zip release file.
3. Log in to your ClassicPress admin dashboard.
4. Navigate to Appearance > Themes.
5. Click Add New, then Upload Theme.
6. Select the aestazia-child.zip file and click Install Now.
7. Once installed, click Activate.

wp theme install https://github.com/ElisabettaCarrara/aestazia-child/releases/latest/download/aestazia-child.zip --activate

(Note: Ensure the parent theme Aestazia is installed first).

Once activated, navigate to Appearance > Customize and open the Theme Design panel to access all visual settings.

To override the site’s core colors:

1. Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Theme Design > Bootstrap Palette.
2. Use the color pickers to set values for Primary Color, Secondary Color, Body Background, Body Text, Heading Color, and Accent Color.
3. Changes are applied immediately as CSS custom properties in :root via an inline <style id="aestazia-design-system"> block injected into wp_head.
4. Click Publish.

Leaving any picker empty preserves the default value defined in style.css.

To change the fonts used across the site:

1. Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Theme Design > Typography.
2. Select a font for Body Font, Headings H1–H3, and Headings H4–H6 from the dropdown. The full Bunny Fonts catalogue is available; the dropdown falls back to a curated list (Inter, Roboto, Lora, Playfair Display, Poppins, Montserrat) if the Bunny Fonts API is unreachable.
3. Click Publish.

On Publish, the theme checks whether the selected fonts are already present in wp-content/uploads/aestazia-fonts/. If the selection has changed since the last save, it downloads the font files and a rewritten fonts.css from Bunny Fonts and stores them locally. Subsequent page loads serve fonts entirely from your own server — no external requests reach visitors’ browsers, keeping the setup fully GDPR-compliant without any cookie banner for fonts.

If the download fails (e.g. a temporary network error), the theme falls back to loading fonts directly from the Bunny Fonts CDN until the next successful Publish. The error is logged to the PHP error log with the prefix Aestazia Child — for easy tracing.

To use the 3-column footer:

1. Navigate to Appearance > Widgets.
2. Drag and drop your desired widgets into Footer Column 1, Footer Column 2, and Footer Column 3.

To assign colors to categories:

1. Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Theme Design > Category Colors.
2. Pick a color for each category listed.
3. Open Theme Design > Category Color Application and check which elements the color should be applied to: Card Border, Post Title, and/or Read More Link.
4. Click Publish.

Colors are output as scoped CSS variables (e.g. --post-card-border, --bs-link-color, --bs-btn-bg) on .post-card.primary-cat-{slug} selectors. The primary-cat-{slug} class is injected automatically on each post’s <article> element by the post_class filter in functions.php, using the first assigned category as the primary one.

To hide the page title on specific pages:

1. Edit a page.
2. In the right-hand sidebar under Page Attributes, locate the Template dropdown.
3. Select either Default Page – No Title (keeps the sidebar) or Full-Width Template – No Title (removes the sidebar).
4. Update/Publish the page.

Contributions and bug reports are welcome! If you would like to contribute:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch for your feature or bugfix.
3. Submit a Pull Request.

Please ensure any changes pass the ClassicPress Coding Standards (CPCS). Checks run automatically on every commit via GitHub Actions. A CPCS summary is appended to the GitHub Actions step summary for each run.

On every published release, a GitHub Actions workflow automatically packages the theme into an installable aestazia-child-{version}.zip and attaches it to the release as a downloadable asset.

• Fix: Category Color Application settings in the Customizer were not persisting after save due to improper boolean sanitization.
• Improvement: Standardized checkbox settings to use absint with explicit theme_mod type for reliable storage.

• Fix: Font-family CSS declarations were broken by incorrect esc_html() wrapping of the inline <style> block — quotes were converted to HTML entities, making the browser ignore all font selections.
• Fix: Bunny Fonts downloader used post_value() which is only valid during the Customizer preview phase; switched to get_theme_mod() so the correct newly-saved fonts are always downloaded.
• Fix: Font downloader now checks whether the selected fonts are already present locally before re-downloading, using a fonts-meta.json sidecar file. Unchanged selections on Publish make no HTTP requests.
• Fix: Local font CSS used root-relative URLs that broke on subdirectory installs; switched to absolute baseurl from wp_upload_dir().
• Fix: Duplicate post_class filter caused layout-left/layout-right classes to be added twice to every post card; removed the redundant anonymous filter.
• Improvement: Font download failures now log a descriptive message to the PHP error log instead of failing silently.
• Improvement: SSL verification re-enabled on all Bunny Fonts HTTP requests.
• Improvement: WP_Filesystem bootstrap extracted into a shared helper to remove duplicated code.
• Improvement: register_sidebar() strings are now translatable via esc_html__().

Aestazia Child is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) or later.