Release 1.3.0 — retire Epsilon, add theme.json, clear the ground for blocks

[puikinsh]

The groundwork release. Nothing a visitor sees should change; everything a
future block-editor and FSE rewrite depends on should be in place by the end
of it.

	1.2.21	1.3.0
files in zip	228	116
download	1.87 MB	1.57 MB
PHP files	88	51
Theme Check INFO items	~17	3

Epsilon is gone

inc/libraries/ deleted — 144 files, 1.3 MB, 52% of the shipped theme. What
it was actually providing, and what replaces it:

was	now
Epsilon_Control_Toggle ×31	core checkbox controls
Epsilon_Control_Slider ×1	Shapely_Control_Range (~45 lines)
Epsilon_Section_Pro	Shapely_Section_Link
Epsilon_Section_Recommended_Actions	Shapely_Section_Link → welcome screen
Epsilon_Welcome_Screen (850 lines)	Shapely_Welcome
Epsilon_Notify_System	nothing — see below

Shapely_Notify_System no longer extends it. Nothing was inherited: every
self:: call resolves to a method defined in the child, the two that looked
inherited were already overridden because the parent hardcoded
ABSPATH . 'wp-content/plugins/', and no parent-only method is referenced
anywhere in the theme.

A latent bug this surfaced

Every Epsilon control sat behind class_exists() with a core fallback in the
else. Those fallbacks were never complete — two registered 6 controls where
the Epsilon branch registered 11, and one had no else at all. Had Epsilon ever
failed to load, these 11 controls would have silently vanished:

post_author, post_category, post_date, title_above_post, title_in_header,
project_author, project_category, project_date, project_title_in_header,
title_above_project

So the core registrations are generated from the Epsilon branch, which was the
complete one. Counts as the check that nothing was dropped:

add_setting  52 -> 52
add_control  74 -> 52   (22 duplicate registrations from else branches removed)

theme.json

v2, matching the WordPress 6.4 floor. Owns the palette, type scale, heading
sizes and layout widths. The customizer stays authoritative: each colour theme
mod overrides the matching --wp--preset--color--* property, so blocks and the
classic front end resolve to one value instead of two palettes disagreeing.

Things that were quietly broken

• "Wide width" and "Full width" did nothing. The theme has declared
  add_theme_support( 'align-wide' ) since 2018 without ever shipping the CSS
  those classes need.
• Images in post content overflowed. Bootstrap 3 only makes images
  responsive via .img-responsive, which block markup never carries.
• Generic asset handles. bootstrap, flexslider, owl.carousel and
  owl.carousel.theme are now theme-prefixed — the same fault that blanked
  every icon on Elementor sites in 1.2.20. jquery-masonry is left alone; that
  is a core handle.
• ->transport on a possibly-null setting, and setup_recommended_actions()
  using a class it never required.

Security

The old welcome-screen AJAX endpoint took a class name and a method name from
POST and called $class::$method(). It was whitelisted to one class, but that
pattern is not worth reimplementing — dismissals now run through one handler
that does one thing, with a nonce and a capability check.

Migration

No theme mod was renamed. All 52 settings keep their names, so saved values
are read by the same code that wrote them. What needed carrying is the state
Epsilon owned: dismissed actions move from shapely_actions_left (an
id => false map) to a flat list, or every action a site owner had already dealt
with would reappear. Legacy options are read but not deleted, so a downgrade to
1.2.x still finds its own state. Established sites are marked as having seen the
onboarding notice — on a site running for years that notice would be the one
visible sign of an update meant to change nothing.

Verified by upgrading the live demo from 1.2.21

theme mods    8 before, 8 after — none lost, none changed, including
              shapely_sticky_header_transparency (the former slider)
body markup   99.95% identical across 4 page types; every single difference
              is an asset handle gaining its shapely- prefix
customizer    204 settings, 196 controls, 29 sections register clean
front end     5/5 pages pass, 0 blank icons, 0 broken images, 0 JS errors

One visible change, stated plainly

WordPress stops emitting classic-theme-styles once a theme ships theme.json.
Core Button blocks therefore lose the generic grey pill core gave them and take
the theme's own button style instead. They are styled, not unstyled — but a
site using core Button blocks will see them change from grey pills to Shapely
buttons. The demo has zero Button blocks, so no impact there.

Compatibility

Child themes dequeuing bootstrap, flexslider, owl.carousel or
owl.carousel.theme need the new handles. This is the one intentional break,
and the reason it lands in a major. Documented in the readme upgrade notice.