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The Gatsby WP Themes project has launched a new marketplace for developers who are building WordPress-powered sites with Gatsby on the frontend. Originally founded by Zac Gordon and Alexandra Spalato, the commercial venture is now primarily managed by Spalato and Paulina Hetman.

The team’s first project involved porting the Twenty Twenty WordPress Theme to a Gatsby WP Theme. They are now focused on creating commercial themes targeted at developers and agencies who can use them to save time when building clients’ sites. Gatsby is more well-suited to sites that don’t have a lot of dynamic content, such as marketing or documentation sites.

Gatsby WP Themes is launching with several starter themes with different styles for each child theme. They include designs suitable for blogs, personal sites, businesses, restaurants, and portfolios.

Gatsby themes have several distinct advantages over just grabbing a starter or boilerplate Gatsby site from GitHub. Spaloto identified a few reasons why developers might opt for using a theme:

  • Gatsby themes allow Gatsby site functionality to be packaged as a standalone product for reuse.
  • All of your default configuration lives in an npm package.
  • Themes are versioned packages that can be updated like any other package.
  • If you created multiple sites using the same theme, you can just update the central theme to push changes across all of them.
  • Themes are composable: You can install a blog theme alongside a notes theme, alongside an e-commerce theme (and so forth).

All themes in the new Gatsby WP Themes marketplace include built-in support for dynamic comments, search, Mailchimp integration, sitemaps, Google analytics or Google Tag Manager, and various widgets. The marketplace also includes Gatsby plugins that make popular WordPress plugins more compatible with Gatsby frontends. The current offerings add support for Contact Form 7, lightbox functionality, and Yoast SEO.

Spalato and Hetman are aiming at connecting with WordPress users who don’t code, those who don’t know React but want to use Gatsby, agencies, developers, and marketers. They have not promoted the marketplace much but already have more than 800 subscribers on Mailchimp. The team plans to release new themes and/or starters frequently as they continue building up their catalog of products.