SextantTravel Magazine WordPress Theme

Overview

Who it is for

Sextant is for a travel journal, a boutique tour operator or an expedition outfitter whose case for itself is the writing and the places, not a booking widget bolted onto a generic template. Destinations are a first-class content type with their own region taxonomy, price and summary — a real catalogue, not a stack of blog posts dressed up as one.

Built, then rebuilt on its own foundation

This theme started life driven entirely by GSAP and ScrollTrigger — a capable and popular combination, and also one this catalogue could not ship: GreenSock distributes both “All rights reserved” under their own standard licence, which cannot be redistributed inside a GPL theme sold to many buyers. Rather than swap in a different dependency with the same problem, every effect was rebuilt natively.

The preloader, the split-line headline reveals, the pinned horizontal destination gallery, parallax, counters, the custom cursor and the magnetic buttons now run on a small shared motion layer (assets/js/motion.js) built from IntersectionObserver, CSS transitions and one requestAnimationFrame loop. Lenis still provides the inertia scroll and three.js still drives the aurora and the contact page’s dotted globe — both genuinely MIT-licensed, so both stayed.

Rebuilding the pinned gallery surfaced a real CSS trap worth naming: the section wrapping it used overflow: clip on both axes, and clipping both axes silently disables position: sticky on every descendant. Scoping the clip to the horizontal axis only was the actual fix — the kind of thing that is invisible until you go looking for why a sticky element refuses to stick.

Migration audit

Moving this theme into the catalogue surfaced content issues worth listing plainly, because they are the kind that hide until a buyer runs into them: a heading-splitting effect that quietly deleted every space between words and between wrapped lines (rendering as, for example, “Destinationswechart”) with no console error to flag it; a primary-menu item hard-linked to the original developer’s local address; and an image reference and several database rows pointing at the same stale local host — which does not merely 404 on an ordinary server, but can silently redirect a visitor into an entirely unrelated site if that address happens to be live on a shared host. All are fixed, and the theme’s own name now runs correctly through the site’s actual title everywhere it appears, rather than being written into the template as fixed text.