Torque was created at WordCamp San Francisco in 2013 as a way to give back to the WordPress community. That vision has since grown and made Torque a leading resource in WordPress. Geared toward beginner and experienced developers alike, Torque aims to help every person make the most out of WordPress.
That is why, after nearly six years, the Torque Team is proud to announce a fresh new Torque experience for our readers in 2019 and beyond. The redesign took 12 months of planning and countless people to bring it to life. This is a huge win for Torque and WordPress community as a whole.
The new developer-first design focuses on better usability through improved navigation and content reorganization. Whether a user is a beginner or experienced developer, they will be able to find the content that suits them faster and easier.
The new color scheme and images were chosen with developers in mind. A darker palette was inspired by apps that support dark-mode, a preference of many developers worldwide. We’ve also updated the logos from some of your favorite Torque columns: Torque Toons, News Drop, and Faces of WordPress.
An improved article view puts the focus on the authors, who are all members of the WordPress community. Perhaps one of the biggest changes we made was removing featured images from all articles and archives views. This places the emphasis squarely on our content and contributors, providing an uninterrupted learning experience for our readers.
Another big change we’ve made is to the home page, which has been broken into various sections making it easier to display older, yet still relevant content, as well as promote videos, editorial cartoons, and downloadable pieces. Users no longer have to search or scroll through pages of articles to find content of interest.
In addition to the design updates, we have decluttered and deprecated irrelevant and duplicate categories, surfacing every category in the site footer, making browsing our content easier than ever before. Love our videos? Videos now have their own tab, so every interview and News Drop can be easily accessed and enjoyed.
The new site combines the power of the Genesis framework, Gutenberg and WP Engine’s Atomic Blocks plugin. We developed custom blocks, modified existing blocks, and, of course, leveraged the fantastic library of core blocks to create a fully customizable site experience from the WordPress dashboard. We feel the new site is a great demonstration of what can be done with WordPress today and can’t wait for you to interact with it.
The goal of this redesign is not only to breathe new life into Torque but also to create a better product for the WordPress community. We believe that we have achieved that with the new experience.
Loving the new design? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment or tweeting us @torquemag.
