QuadrangleSchool WordPress Theme

Overview

Who it is for

Quadrangle is for a school. An independent day or boarding school, a prep school, a sixth-form college — anywhere whose website has to convince a parent that this is the right place for their child, and then get them through the gate to see it.

Nothing in the code is school-specific, though. Curriculum, staff and calendar are three separate content types with their own fields, archives and ordering, and the two taxonomies are stage and department — the two axes a school genuinely thinks in. A music school, a nursery group or a college fits without template changes.

Built around the visit, not the brochure

The next open morning is pulled from the calendar and shown on the opening screen. It is never typed twice, so it cannot go stale in one place and not the other, and it disappears by itself once the date passes.

Events store a real date and the calendar orders by it. Entries that have already happened stay listed and are marked as past rather than vanishing — a parent checking whether they missed something needs to be able to see that they did.

The background is a calculation, not a photograph

A school with grounds sells the light under its trees. So that is what the ground of this theme is: layered canopy noise drifting on a wandering wind, thresholded almost binary because a leaf either blocks the sun or does not, and then convolved with a disc the angular size of the sun.

That last step is the whole thing. The sun subtends about half a degree, so every gap projects a slightly blurred image of it. A gap narrower than that blur circle stops reproducing its own shape and starts reproducing the sun’s — which is why real sunflecks are round coins even when the gaps casting them are ragged. Here it falls out of an actual convolution rather than being drawn in.

Legibility is measured, not hoped for

Body text sits directly on the moving ground, so how far that ground may travel from paper is capped in the shader, and every text colour was checked against the darkest pixel it can produce — rgb(214,214,207) — rather than against flat paper. All three text tones clear WCAG AA at 4.5:1 on that worst case, and the lightest sits at the top of the range the measurement allows rather than at a round number.

Degrades rather than dies

The canopy draws in two passes: a cheap transmittance pass into a small offscreen texture, then the sun-disc convolution reading it back as seven texture fetches instead of forty-two noise evaluations. It also measures its own frame time and steps down through reduced resolutions before giving up, so a weak GPU gets a smaller live canopy rather than a dead page. Reduced-motion visitors never download the canopy or its shaders at all.

Typography

Source Serif carries the voice and Albert Sans carries the working text — timetables, labels, forms. Both are self-hosted variable fonts under the SIL Open Font Licence, so the theme makes no third-party request of any kind.

On photography

The demo ships six staff portraits, all CC0 from Wikimedia Commons, each licence verified on the file’s own page and each inspected before use; cropping to 4:5 is the only edit. Sources, photographers and every rejected candidate are listed in CREDITS.md — sixteen files were reviewed to find six, with rejections recorded on brand-mark, register and respect-for-the-subject grounds.

Selection was restricted to deliberately posed, styled portraits of adults, which short of a documented model release is the strongest available signal that the subject took part knowingly. No image of a child appears in the theme or its demo, and none should be added to one.

Staff photography is also the first thing a real school replaces, so the absent state is designed rather than left broken: a member of staff without a portrait gets a monogram of their initials in the theme’s serif, honorifics ignored. Upload a photograph and it replaces the monogram automatically.