LodestarFoundation WordPress Theme

Overview

Who it is for

Lodestar is for a grant-making foundation, a community trust or an endowment — an organisation whose credibility rests on being able to show where the money went, in public, without being asked twice. It is not a donation-drive template. There is no progress bar and no countdown; the persuasion is the record.

The breakdown is computed, not drawn

Almost every foundation website answers the one question a donor actually has with a pie chart saved as an image: a number that was true once, drawn by a designer, and never checked again. Lodestar computes it. Grants are a content type with a real amount field, and the split on the front page is summed from those records at render time, then cached until a grant is edited — not on a timer, because a timer would let the published figure lag behind the records it claims to summarise.

Change a grant and the split changes. Delete one and it changes back. The headline total cannot drift away from the list of grants underneath it, because there is no second place to keep it up to date. Shares are worked out after the total is known, so they always add to a hundred, and a programme that received a small award is reported as “under 1%” rather than rounded down to a zero that misstates the record.

One point per person

The background is a single GPU-instanced point field, and the number of points is the number of people the foundation says it reached — the same figure the opening sentence states in words. It is one instanced draw call with no textures and no post-processing, positioned with a low-discrepancy sequence so the field reads as a population rather than as noise with clumps and voids in it.

It is capped, deliberately, at a density where even a fully saturated stack of overlapping points leaves every text tone in the theme inside WCAG AA. That budget was computed from the shader’s own limit rather than sampled from a screenshot, because a screenshot only shows the density that happened to be on screen for one frame.

Degrades in steps, and never disappears

The field measures its own frame time and steps down through reduced point counts one rung at a time before it gives up, so the machines that need the reduced tiers can actually reach them. It judges frame times on their median rather than their mean, because a mean is dominated by the stalls a browser produces for reasons that have nothing to do with the canvas.

With prefers-reduced-motion set, the field is still drawn — once, with no drift, no parallax and no animation loop. Reduced motion means no movement, not no graphic: this field carries the headline figure, so removing it would take information away from the reader rather than take away movement. Where WebGL2 is unavailable the page renders on plain paper and nothing else changes.

What is in the box

• Programmes — what the foundation funds, who leads each one, when applications open, and what it will not fund.
• Grants — recipient, amount, date, term, programme and purpose, with the amount stored as an integer so it can be summed and sorted.
• People — trustees and staff. Portraits are optional; without one, a card falls back to a set monogram that ignores honorifics rather than showing a grey rectangle.

No page builder, no ACF, no build step, and no third-party JavaScript at all — the shader, the motion layer and the quality governor are written for this theme. The only bundled binaries are two variable fonts, both under the SIL Open Font License.