CivicPress 0.7.3 is out. This one is lighter than the last few, and it’s aimed at a specific annoyance: the documentation and the design system were never where you actually needed them. Now they are, right inside the CivicPress menu in WordPress.
No PHP bump this time. No breaking changes. Update whenever you’re ready.
Your documentation now lives in the CivicPress menu
I’ve always thought it was a little backwards that you build a site in one place and read the docs in another. You’re in WordPress doing the work, and the how-to is sitting in some browser tab you have to go dig up first. So we moved it. The user documentation now shows up in the CivicPress menu, next to everything else you’re already using. When you need to know how something works, it’s right there.
Small change. Saves you the tab-hunting. That’s the whole point.
A dynamic design system visualization
CivicPress ships with a full USWDS-based design system (colors, typography, spacing, the patterns you build pages from) and until now you kind of had to trust it was all in there. The new visualization in the CivicPress menu just shows it to you. Your building blocks, laid out, pulled dynamically from the theme itself. It’s not a static screenshot that goes stale the second something changes. It reflects what’s actually in your install.
If you’ve ever had to explain to a stakeholder why the site stays consistent, or you just wanted to see the pieces before you start assembling a page, this is for you.
For the developers
Two things under the hood worth calling out. First, the patterns we include are now compatible with the experimental Guidelines feature, so if you’re poking at Guidelines you won’t hit friction with the patterns CivicPress ships. Second, we added agentic instructions for generating documentation, covering blocks, patterns, template parts, functions, styles, and more. If you’re building on top of CivicPress with an AI assistant in the loop (a lot of us are now), the theme can hand it the context it needs to document what you make.
That second one is still early and we’re still figuring out the edges of i. But it’s the direction things are going, so we’re building for it.
The complete changelog lives at civicpress.us/changelog.
Have questions or want to see CivicPress in action? Get in touch.