Tribune is one of the oldest themes in our collection — a newspaper design that has been running news sites since version 1.0. Tribune 4.3 is its biggest update in years: instead of one design, the theme now gives you four, each with its own demo, plus a dark mode your visitors can switch on themselves and a way to build the homepage entirely with blocks.
If you’re already running Tribune, nothing changes when you update — your site keeps the design it has today. Here’s what’s new when you’re ready to explore.
One theme, four designs
The centre of this release is a new Color Style setting in Theme Options → General. It isn’t a colour palette: each style is a complete design with its own typography, spacing, header, featured area and widgets. Pick one from the visual selector, save, and the whole site switches — your content, menus, widgets and settings stay exactly as they were.
Classic is the Tribune you know, with the navy menu bar — lightly refreshed in 4.3 with flatter date labels, quieter slider controls, cleaner sidebar widgets and a main navigation that now sticks to the top as you scroll.
Editorial is a flat magazine design: a wider canvas, hairline rules, letterspaced labels and Newsreader headlines paired with Inter Tight.
Modern is soft and card-based — rounded corners, elevated cards, a blue accent and Plus Jakarta Sans throughout.
Broadsheet is a revival of the original Tribune 1.0 newspaper: condensed Barlow headlines over PT Serif copy, charcoal rules, a cream-framed feature photo, a “Breaking News” flag and a homepage built from full-width bands.
Because switching is just a setting, you can try each one on your real site and switch back if it isn’t for you. Read the docs →
Dark mode, with a switch your visitors control
Editorial, Modern and Broadsheet each come with a dark colour scheme. Turn on the Dark Mode Toggle and a sun/moon switch appears in the header — visitors click it to change the scheme, and their choice is remembered on their next visit.
You decide what first-time visitors see with the Default Color Scheme option: Light, Dark, or System, which follows the visitor’s own device preference. Both settings live next to the Color Style selector in Theme Options. Read the docs →
Four demos, one click each
The Demo Importer now offers a ready-made site for every style:
- Default — the Classic style with the widget-driven homepage
- Broadsheet — the newspaper revival, also widget-driven
- Modern — the Modern style with a homepage built from blocks
- Blocks — the Editorial style with a homepage built from blocks
Import the one closest to what you want, then change the Color Style later if you like — the two are independent. Read the docs →
Build the homepage with blocks
Tribune’s homepage has always been assembled from Theme Options and widget areas. That still works exactly as before — but 4.3 adds an alternative: the homepage can be an ordinary page you build in the block editor, with no page builder plugin.
When you create a new page, Tribune offers a Home template starter pattern that drops the entire homepage layout onto the canvas. From there you rearrange sections, change which category each one pulls from, delete what you don’t need and add anything else.
To match its design, the theme also registers a few block styles: Buttons for the Categories and Tags blocks, Thumbnail List for Latest Posts, Surface for a card-style Group, and Link for a plain-text Button. They follow whichever Color Style is active, dark scheme included. There’s a new Full Width (No Title) page template to let the layout run edge to edge. Read the docs →
A Video Widget that works like a playlist
Right behind 4.3.0 comes 4.3.1, which rebuilds the WPZOOM: Video Widget. On the front end it’s now a playlist: each row shows the video’s thumbnail, duration and title, and the one playing is highlighted.
Setting it up is simpler, too. Paste a video link — YouTube, Vimeo or any other site WordPress can embed — and the widget shows a preview card with the thumbnail, title and provider, and fills in the title for you. Embed codes still work as before. You can add or remove videos in place, up to 20 per widget, instead of choosing a count and saving first.
Lighter and faster
Alongside the new designs, 4.3 modernises a fair amount of the theme’s front end. The Breaking News ticker is now a pure CSS animation, the Carousel and Tabs widgets only load their scripts on pages that actually use them, and the YouTube player only loads when a slide embeds a video. Icon fonts are no longer loaded at all — icons are inline SVG, so they still pick up your Customizer colours. Less to download, and less running in the visitor’s browser.
Updating
Tribune 4.3 is a free update for all license holders — you’ll see it under Dashboard → Updates, or download the ZIP from your WPZOOM account.
After updating, clear the cache in any caching or optimization plugin, since a good part of the front-end code changed. Your site will stay on the Classic style until you choose another.
New to Tribune? Browse the four demos or read the documentation — and let us know which style you pick. Still comparing? Tribune sits alongside Domino Magazine and Prime News in our WordPress newspaper and magazine themes.
