PokaTheme 5.0.1: five one-click demos, eight styles and news layouts

PokaTheme 5.0.1 is out, one day after 5.0.0. It adds a one-click demo for every style, four new style variations, news layouts for the Posts List, menu badges, and the fixes we found by building all of that on the theme itself.

It is an update in place: upload it over 5.0.0, and there is nothing to migrate.

Five demos, one per style

The import screen, Appearance → PokaTheme Demos, now offers five demos instead of one. Every demo is the same theme. What differs is the style it switches on and the site it imports.

• PokaTheme: the casino review site, on the default style.
• Slots Dark: a dark slots affiliate site with twelve slot sites, eight game providers, ten slot reviews, twelve bonuses and news.
• Sports Betting: a sports betting news site with twelve bookmakers, a lead story with four beside it, news by sport, ranked bookmakers and bonuses.
• Crypto Exchange: an exchange comparison and news site with twelve exchanges and wallets, and sign-up credit, cashback and staking offers.
• Poker Room: a poker site comparison and news site with twelve poker sites, and rakeback and tournament-ticket bonuses.

Every brand, game, token and offer on the four new demos is invented, and their artwork was drawn for them, with no people and no real logos in it. You can show them anywhere, including behind an ad. Open any of them live, then click Import Demo on the one you want.

Four new style variations, with skins

Slots Dark, Sports Betting, Crypto Exchange and Poker Room are style variations too, which brings PokaTheme to eight. You can switch an existing site to one under Customizer → Visual Settings → Style without importing anything.

A style can now ship a skin: one stylesheet for the shapes a set of colours cannot describe, like Slots Dark’s italic section titles, glowing buttons and floating cards. A skin loads only while its style is picked, never overrides a colour you set yourself, and leaves your child theme free for your own changes. The page body also carries a poka-style-<slug> class for the active style, in case your child theme needs a rule for one style only.

News layouts for the Posts List

The Posts List block and the [posts_list] shortcode now take a Layout:

Layout	What it looks like
Cards	The layout every list already has, and still the default
Image tiles	The photo is the tile, with the category, headline and date on it
Magazine	A lead tile with up to four compact cards beside it
Headlines	Rows of title and date, with a small thumbnail if you want one

Two settings work with any layout. Skip the first posts (offset) lets a second list on the same page carry on where the first one stopped, and category label on the image (category_chip) puts the category on a card’s photo. A lead story with four cards, and the next six stories as headlines under it:

[posts_list layout="magazine" num="5"]
[posts_list layout="headlines" num="6" offset="5"]

“Load more” pages in the same layout, and the layouts’ stylesheet only loads on pages that use one.

Menu badges and bonus types

• Menu badges. Give a menu item the CSS class poka-badge-new, poka-badge-hot, poka-badge-top, poka-badge-best or poka-badge-live (Appearance → Menus → Screen Options → CSS Classes) and it gets a small label after its title. The label is real, translatable text, not a picture of a word.
• Bonus type on bonus cards. The Bonus List block and the [poka_bonus_list] and [poka_bonus] shortcodes can print a bonus’s type, such as Welcome bonus or Free bets, above its headline. Turn on Show the bonus type, or add show_type="true". It is off by default, so existing pages do not change.

Fixed

• Hidden link labels showed as visible text. On some sites every link in a post was followed by “- Link”. The labels are gone, and the theme now hides its own screen-reader text itself.
• Dark footers were hard to read. On the styles with a dark footer, widget headings, menus and the compliance lines used the dark body text colour. They now use the Footer Text colour, and the copyright bar uses the footer’s own colours.
• Pages scrolled sideways on wide screens when a right-hand menu item had a third level. That dropdown now opens to the left.
• Crypto and forex sites no longer mention gambling in the footer’s compliance lines.
• Geolocation no longer fills the PHP error log when a review’s allowed-countries list contains something that is not a country code.
• Bold italic text renders bold. The bundled Roboto italic files are variable fonts now, covering weights 400 to 900.
• The Posts List category takes a slug as well as an ID, so a page built on a category survives an export and import.
• Demo imports now bring back the logo, the site icon, the How we rate and Responsible gambling pages, the menus in footer widgets and the posts page, and move WordPress’s untouched Hello world! post to the trash.
• Imported bonuses named the wrong operator, because the import kept operator IDs from the site the demo was built on. Imports now point every bonus, and every review’s Alternatives and Compare with, at the reviews they imported.
• The author box biography was nearly invisible in dark mode.

If you imported the demo with 5.0.0

The wrong-operator fix applies to new imports. For bonuses you imported with the 5.0.0 demo, open each one under Bonuses → Edit and pick its operator again.

How to update

Download PokaTheme 5.0.1 from your account and upload it through Appearance → Themes. Please do not overwrite the theme folder over FTP on a live site. The documentation covers the new demos, styles, news layouts and menu badges in detail.