Solo King · Version 1.0.0Documentation

1. Design DNA

Solo King is built on a single visual thesis: one product, presented as a numbered edition — the way a fine press treats a plate mark, or a distillery treats a batch. Every design decision in the theme descends from that thesis. Knowing the DNA makes every customization decision obvious.

• The plate-mark aesthetic. Imagery sits inside offset champagne frames (.sk-frame) like plates in a folio. Content is sealed, framed, and measured — never floating, never generic. Rules are hairline; corners are considered, not rounded into anonymity.
• Palette with a hierarchy. Ink (near-black green) carries authority; jade is the single brand action color; champagne gold is reward — reserved for seals, rules, frames, and moments of proof. Paper and bone do the breathing. Sale coral appears only where money is saved.
• Type as voice. Fraunces (variable, SOFT-tuned) speaks in display sizes with an italic used for emphasis and signatures; Inter var handles the working text. Eyebrows are letter-spaced caps — the theme's "engraved label" register.
• Numbers everywhere. Batch numbers, active percentages, day counts, edition marks (Nº). Quantification is the brand's honesty device — it is how a single-product store earns trust without a catalog.
• Motion: settle, don't bounce. Everything arrives like paper laid on a desk — short travel, long ease-out, staggered children (70 ms), framed imagery settling from a 4.5% over-scale. Nothing loops except the marquee; nothing moves for users who ask it not to (prefers-reduced-motion is honored everywhere, including the hero drift and the Transformation instrument).
• Iconography. A single 1.7px-stroke line set, drawn on a 24px grid — never mixed with filled or off-grid icons.
• Photography direction. Warm-lit, shallow-focus, on bone or ink fields; the product is always the only saturated object in frame. The bundled demo set follows this; replacement photography should too.

When extending the theme, test any addition against the DNA: is it framed, is it measured, does it settle? If yes, it will look native.

2. Installation

1. Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme.
2. Choose solo-king.zip, install, and Activate.
3. Install and activate WooCommerce. The theme runs without it, but every commerce feature (and the demo product) needs it.
4. You'll land on a pointer to Appearance → Solo King — the setup screen.

Requirements: WordPress 6.2+, PHP 7.4+ (8.x recommended). No build tools, no plugins beyond WooCommerce.

3. One-click demo import

Appearance → Solo King → Import the demo. In a few seconds the importer creates, programmatically and without any XML or extra plugin:

• The demo product AURUM Nº 1 — Botanical Renewal Serum ($68, in stock, gallery attached) plus four approved sample reviews.
• All nine demo images, sideloaded into your Media Library.
• Pages: Home (assigned as front page), Journal (assigned as posts page), About, and Contact — the latter two composed from the theme's block patterns.
• Two Journal articles with cover art.
• Primary and footer menus, created and assigned.
• Theme settings pointed at all of the above (hero image, story imagery, featured product).

If WooCommerce is inactive, the import completes everything except the product and reports a "partial" state; activate WooCommerce and run it again to finish.

4. Customizer map

Everything lives under Appearance → Customize → Solo King. Colors repaint the preview instantly; text edits refresh only the section being edited.

5. Homepage sections

The front page is a loop over a registry. Default order:

hero → trustbar → marquee → story → formula → benefits → ritual
→ stats → transformation → comparison → usecases → press → testimonials
→ product → reviews → faq → guarantee → founder → cta

• Hero — headline, italic second line, lead, rating row, two actions, note, floating chips, plate-mark product frame.
• Trust bar — four icon statements.
• Marquee — the King's Seal: an infinite champagne-ruled ribbon; pauses on hover, honest with reduced motion.
• Story — three alternating chapters with framed imagery and check-listed points.
• Benefits / Use cases — icon card grids.
• Stats — count-up numbers on an ink field.
• Comparison — accessible them-vs-us table with a highlighted brand column.
• Testimonials — snap-scroll editorial quotes with keyboard-reachable controls.
• Product (Offer) — one / two / three-bottle tiers with live WooCommerce pricing, savings math, and a highlighted middle tier.
• Reviews — your store's real approved reviews; hides until they exist.
• FAQ — animated accordion, first item open, ARIA-complete.
• Guarantee — the rotating dashed seal.
• CTA — closing band in ink, jade, or champagne.

Five of the nineteen are signature sections — compositions you will not find in a page-builder kit:

• The Formula — an active-ingredient dossier: four numbered cards with oversized percentages, closed by the ink-field "Left out, on purpose" strip of struck-through exclusions.
• The Ritual — a four-step AM/PM rail on a champagne line, with time chips and icon nodes; collapses to a vertical timeline on mobile.
• The Transformation — a draggable before/after instrument with a champagne seal for a divider. Driven by a native range input, so pointer, touch, keyboard, and screen readers all get the identical control.
• In Print — one oversized Fraunces-italic pull quote above a row of masthead wordmarks, each set in its own type treatment.
• Founder Letter — a letter on paper with a drop cap and a display-italic signature, beside a framed atelier image. The human seal on the brand.

Developers can add, remove, or reorder sections in code via the solo_king_home_sections filter (see Hooks).

6. Product page anatomy

• Gallery — theme-native thumbnails (or stacked layout), crossfade switching, arrow-key navigation, and a dependency-free native-dialog lightbox. Flexslider, PhotoSwipe, and zoom scripts are dequeued.
• Summary — title, rating anchor to #reviews, price, benefit chips, honest low-stock line (real stock numbers only, below your threshold), quantity stepper, oversized add-to-cart, trust rows, product accordions.
• Tabs are retired — description renders as "The details," an editorial prose band; reviews as a full-width band below.
• Sticky buy bar — slides up only after the real form scrolls out of view; disappears when scrolling back.
• AJAX add — simple and variable products submit without a page load and open the drawer; if anything fails, the form gracefully falls back to the classic submit.

7. Drawer, cart & checkout

• Drawer — focus-trapped slide-out with line items, steppers (debounced), removal, free-shipping progress bar, subtotal, and checkout button. Updates arrive as WooCommerce fragments; the cart count badge animates on every change.
• Cart page — the same ship-bar above a refined table that becomes a card layout on phones; cross-sells in a 2×2.
• Checkout — two columns with a sticky order review, restyled fields and payment boxes, a trust strip under Place Order, and no distractions.

8. Landing template

Assign "Landing (focused)" to any page and the announcement bar, navigation, header button, and footer menu disappear — one page, one action. Ideal for ad traffic.

9. Block patterns

The editor ships twelve patterns in three Solo King categories, so inner pages can be assembled on-brand without touching code:

• Conversion — CTA band, Offer tier card, Guarantee + CTA, Batch scarcity note.
• Storytelling — Editorial intro, Three pillars, Founder letter, How-it-works timeline, Statistic band.
• Trust & Proof — Press quote row, FAQ two-column, Ingredient spotlight grid.

The demo About and Contact pages are built from them. All patterns are pure core blocks carrying theme class names, so they inherit your Customizer palette automatically.

10. Hooks & filters

Example — adding a section

add_filter( 'solo_king_home_sections', function ( $sections ) {
	$sections['press'] = __( 'Press', 'your-child' );
	return $sections;
} );
// Then create: template-parts/sections/press.php in your child theme.

11. Child theming

/* style.css in your child theme */
/*
 Theme Name: Solo King Child
 Template:   solo-king
*/

Template parts and the sections registry resolve through the child first. Solo King ships zero WooCommerce template overrides — the quantity stepper and every commerce refinement are hook-based — so WooCommerce updates can never raise the “outdated template files” notice against this theme. Tokens can be overridden with plain CSS variables:

:root { --sk-brand: #7a2f3e; --sk-accent: #d8b98a; }

12. Performance notes

• Fonts are self-hosted variable WOFF2, preloaded, font-display: swap — zero third-party requests.
• WooCommerce's three stock stylesheets are replaced by one token-driven skin; its gallery scripts are dequeued on the single product.
• Theme scripts are deferred; the hero image is preloaded with fetchpriority="high"; content images decode async.
• Animations are opt-out honest: prefers-reduced-motion stills the marquee, reveals, counters, and drawer transitions.

13. Tested configurations

Every release of Solo King passes a fixed matrix before packaging. Wave one of v1.0.0 was verified against the following:

Environment matrix

Scenario checklist

Static gates (run on every build)

• php -l across all PHP; ES5-safe syntax check across all JS.
• Option audit — every solo_king_option() key cross-checked against the defaults registry; unknown keys and dead defaults fail the build.
• Icon audit — every icon reference resolved against the icon registry.
• CSS brace balance and token-only color usage.
• POT regeneration with placeholder-comment verification.

14. Credits & licenses

• Theme: GPL v2 or later — © 2026 Opus Technologies.
• Inter — © The Inter Project Authors (Rasmus Andersson), SIL OFL 1.1 — license at assets/fonts/inter/LICENSE.txt.
• Fraunces — © The Fraunces Project Authors (Undercase Type), SIL OFL 1.1 — license at assets/fonts/fraunces/OFL.txt.
• Icons and demo imagery: original artwork created for this theme.

Solo King · Opus Technologies · Thank you for building with it.