Baseline
Baseline is the practical default for sites that combine posts, pages, author spaces, navigation, and public plugins without a specialized presentation.
Home and listings
The site home can show the blogroll or a selected published root page. Post lists use featured images where available and can fall back to a short generated summary, the full post, or the title only when no summary was written.
Baseline keeps single posts and pages conventional. A featured image is a listing and social-sharing image; it is not automatically repeated above the full entry.
Navigation
The primary menu can appear in the header or sidebar, or be hidden. If no primary menu is configured, a bounded page tree can appear in the header. Page breadcrumbs, sidebar page trees, child-page lists, and the footer menu have separate controls.
The mobile Browse panel carries navigation and enabled sidebar fragments into a compact layout.
Presentation settings
Baseline includes:
- content-width presets, with author-space override
- Sans-serif or Serif publication titles
- public Search and tag visibility
- local syntax highlighting
- flat, card-tree, or disabled page navigation
- post-summary fallback and generated-summary length
The publication-title setting affects site identity and post/page titles. Body text, controls, navigation, and plugin interfaces remain sans-serif.
Media and plugins
Site and author-space banners render as visual cover strips while the normal header remains the textual identity. Public backgrounds remain separate. Sidebar and footer plugin fragments use the shared theme regions and remain available on mobile.
Baseline is also the shared presentation foundation for Blocks, Panel Magazine, Scribe, and Timeline. Custom CSS intended for Baseline should still be reviewed before copying it to one of those themes because their markup and theme-specific classes differ.