Style Manager

Style Manager generates and coordinates colors, typography, and spacing for compatible WordPress themes and blocks. Instead of tuning isolated colors, font sizes, and spacing values by hand, you work with connected design decisions that can flow through the editor, the active theme, compatible blocks, and the front end. Themes that support Style Manager apply the system across site templates and theme details. Compatible blocks can adapt to the same design decisions in context, so sections and blocks feel like part of one site rather than separate styling work. In Style Manager 2.4, the main styling flow is available in the Site Editor, with visual preview boards, editor-canvas previews, a searchable font picker, and a Live Site preview for reviewing unsaved changes before publishing. Free compatible stack You can try Style Manager with this free Pixelgrade stack:

• Anima provides the theme-level integration.
• Nova Blocks provides compatible blocks that can respond to the same design system.

Style Manager also integrates with Pixelgrade LT themes, but premium themes are not required to try the free Anima and Nova Blocks path. What you can shape

• Color palettes with generated roles for compatible themes and blocks.
• Typography choices for headings, body copy, and details.
• Spacing and rhythm controls that keep layouts consistent.
• Theme-supported tweaks and motion settings.
• Live editor previews before saving.
• Context-aware styling for blocks and sections that support Style Manager.

Compatibility Style Manager is not a universal page builder and does not make every theme or block support every control. The full experience depends on your active theme and blocks being built to read Style Manager's design decisions. If a theme or block does not support a specific Style Manager feature, the related controls may be hidden or may not affect that theme or block's output.

Install Style Manager by searching for "Style Manager" in Plugins > Add New, or by using these steps:

1. Download the plugin via WordPress.org.
2. Upload the ZIP file through Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
3. Activate the plugin from the Plugins screen.
4. Use a theme or block library that supports Style Manager. For a free setup, try Anima with Nova Blocks.
5. Open Appearance > Editor for the Site Editor experience.
6. On themes that still expose the Customizer workflow, open Appearance > Customize and look for Style Manager controls.

2.7.0

• New: use fonts installed through the WordPress Font Library (Appearance > Fonts) in Style Manager's font fields. They are listed first, in a "Font Library" group, in both the Customizer and the Site Editor, and they load from your own site.
• New: a Phone Heading Scale next to Font Sizing lets you decide how much headings shrink on phones, without changing any desktop size.
• New: a quiet-text color role for secondary text such as meta, dates, terms and captions. On every palette variation it keeps at least 4.5:1 contrast against its background, and it works with palettes saved before this version without regenerating them.
• New: a Small Rail setting in Layout sets the small rail width on its own, so a site that relied on Content Inset for its rail keeps it without moving the Medium and Large rails.
• Improved: applying a font palette no longer replaces a type hierarchy preset you chose yourself. A palette applies its own hierarchy only while you haven't picked one.
• Improved: the Typography preview now shows per-element overrides such as weight and uppercase, so it matches the site.
• Improved: the Layout board is drawn from the real page geometry (container, rails and Content Inset), so the reading width it prints matches what visitors see.
• Improved: the Phone Heading Scale is grouped with Font Sizing in the Site Editor.
• Improved: font families are chosen in Style Manager, so blocks no longer show their own Font picker. Font size, line height and the other typography settings stay on the blocks.
• Fix: the Layout rail controls (Small Rail, Rail Base and Rail Pitch) now show the width the site actually renders, and the slider and the number box always show the same value.
• Fix: the Design System Preview uses the quiet-text role for muted text, so its contrast matches the site.
• Fix: each font now falls back to fonts of its own kind (serif, sans-serif, display, monospace or handwriting) while it loads or if it fails to load. Display fonts marked as serif or sans in the font catalog get that kind's fallbacks, Font Library fonts get the full fallback list for their kind, and a font of unknown kind gets a neutral system font list.
• Improved: a Content Inset saved before this version, or set by a starter site import, keeps its previous look (the same reading width and small rail). It switches to the new behaviour the next time you save Content Inset in the Customizer, the Site Editor or with wp pixelgrade sm set. Resetting Content Inset goes back to the previous behaviour.
• Developer: --sm-content-inset-explicit: 1 is printed only when Content Inset was saved through Style Manager (the Customizer, the Site Editor or wp pixelgrade sm set), so themes and plugins can tell a chosen value from the default or an imported one.
• Developer: every palette variation emits --sm-fg-muted-color-N, mapped to --sm-current-fg-muted-color in each color context. PHP and JavaScript produce identical values across a 2,060-variation test corpus.

2.6.0

• New: manage the whole design system from the command line with wp pixelgrade sm — read settings, write settings, inspect the structure, and export or import a site's colors, typography and spacing as one document.
• New: apply a color palette without opening a browser, with wp pixelgrade sm apply-color-palette. It generates the same color ramp the editor generates, from the same code.
• New: apply a font palette from the command line with wp pixelgrade sm apply-font-palette.
• New: the same eight design-system verbs are also available through the WordPress Abilities API on WordPress 6.9 and later, so compatible tooling can read and change the design system through exactly the rules the editor follows. They require the same capability the editor requires, and they stay out of the REST API unless a companion plugin explicitly opts them in.
• Improved: wp style-manager flush-cache keeps working and now also points at its new name, wp pixelgrade sm flush-cache.
• Maintenance: harden the inline style output — every place Style Manager prints generated CSS into a page now passes through one shared output helper.
• Maintenance: align the color library the browser runs with the one the command line runs, so both produce identical palettes.
• Developer: every wp pixelgrade sm command answers with one JSON envelope (ok, code, summary, data, warnings, plus persisted, unchanged and stripped on writes) and the 0/1/2/3 exit-code vocabulary. Under --format=json the envelope is a single compact line.
• Developer: all setting writes now run through one Provider\SettingsWriter seam, so the Site Editor REST route, the command line and the abilities cannot disagree about gating, setting ordering, or the post-save fan-out.
• Developer: the command bodies live in Provider\AgentCommands and are shared verbatim by the CLI and the abilities — one implementation behind two surfaces.
• Developer: the headless palette generator ships as a committed build artifact at dist/node/palette-generator.js, with chroma-js pinned to an exact version and a lockstep test asserting the browser copy, the minified copy and the built artifact all carry that same pin.
• Developer: CI now runs the PHP unit suite with Node available, asserts the palette parity guards actually executed rather than skipped, and rebuilds the committed artifact to fail on drift.
• Tests: unit coverage for the settings writer, the shared command cores, the abilities surface, the palette parity fixtures, and the shared style-output helper.

2.5.2

• Fix: Prevent a fatal error when a Customizer text or textarea control receives a list of live-preview selectors instead of a boolean.
• Fix: Prevent a fatal error when a font field is configured without sub-fields.
• Fix: Applying a font palette now changes the typographic voice only. Connected font sizes, fine-tune values and the Usage preset are preserved instead of being rescaled and overwritten.
• Fix: Typography presets no longer compound the scale, so switching between them round-trips back to the original sizes.
• Fix: Honour a font sub-field's configured unit when the stored value supplies none, so letter-spacing and similar roles no longer fall back to their browser default.
• New: Add an independent Rail Gap control to the Sidecar anatomy, with a range that extends to 5x for editorial layouts.

2.5.1

• Fix: Load Carbon Fields editor styles through WordPress 7.1's iframe asset pipeline so controls remain styled inside the editor canvas.
• Fix: Keep Style Manager's admin preview styles in the editor shell instead of copying them into the content iframe.
• Fix: Avoid PHP 8.4 deprecations when initializing the Style Manager Lab configuration.
• Improved: Update editor controls and compatibility metadata for WordPress 7.1.

2.5.0

• New: a Layout section that brings container width, content inset, rails, and vertical rhythm together in one place.
• New: shape sidebar rail sizes with a Rail Scale built from a Base width and a Pitch, including named presets from flat to grand.
• New: preview the layout blueprint contract so companion tools and themes can read the same layout decisions.
• Improved: sites that never touch the new Layout settings render exactly as before — the new tokens stay silent until you adjust them.

2.4.1

• Improved: expand the curated Wordmarks Staff Picks collection with five expressive display faces.

2.4.0

• New: self-host compatible Pixelgrade Cloud fonts on the WordPress site by default, with background retries, refreshes, and resilient local copies for fonts removed from the catalog.
• New: review locally hosted font status and controls in the Pixelgrade Design hub.
• New: choose fonts through a native searchable Site Editor picker with remembered filters and theme-reference fonts.
• New: edit the global Site Title font directly from the Site Title block's Typography inspector, using the same setting and font catalog as Style Manager Typography.
• New: expose a normalized design-system preview contract for companion tools.
• Improved: load font-palette preview families and valid variants before selection, restore distinctive accent typography, and make Preview buttons inherit the selected font.
• Improved: add semantic divider color roles across every palette variation.
• Fix: normalize legacy font preview values and preserve Plus save behavior for direct Site Title font edits.
• Maintenance: refresh the Google Fonts catalog and use WordPress URL and text APIs throughout release-scanned runtime code.

2.3.2

• Improved: preview boards now enter and exit smoothly, including cross-fades when switching directly between previews.
• Fix: Color System pickers remain closed on initial load until the user opens one.
• Maintenance: report privacy-bounded first-party design-service observations to Pixelgrade Cloud, including the canonical site URL, environment, WordPress locale, and plugin/theme versions.
• Tests: define the WordPress admin dependency used by the font-palette unit test.

2.3.1

• New: gentle live-trial "Try & Play" gating for Plus-only advanced controls across Color System (Usage tab), Typography, and font palettes, with a reusable trial overlay and a "Save · Plus" save affordance.
• New: gate cloud font palettes by catalog tier (free/pro).
• New: a Style Manager launcher in the post editor with deep-link previews into the editor.
• Improved: Site Editor sidebar folds theme colors into Color Usage with grouped sections and a docs-link pop-up; clearer two-line visibility feedback on color-target rows.
• Fix: font palette voice tuner keeps pro palettes pinned after a voice-fit sort.
• Fix: FrontendOutput tolerates non-bool color-switch toggle values.
• Fix: dark-mode switcher can override the Light default.
• Maintenance: send the active theme's WUpdates id to Pixelgrade Cloud; hardened feature-story QA flows.

2.3.0-beta2

• Fix: resolve a fresh-install fatal — building the color-palette config could recurse without bound when no Style Manager configuration is stored yet (the palette fallback re-entered option-details during the filter-fields build), exhausting memory on activation. Supersedes 2.3.0-beta1, which is affected.

2.3.0

• New: the full Style Manager experience runs natively inside the Site Editor: colors, typography, spacing, tweaks, and motion, with live preview into the editor canvas and saving through the editor's own Save flow.
• New: section previews: the color system board, the type specimen, a new spacing and rhythm board, and a guided live-site flow for motion with per-behavior replays.
• New: a Live Site preview that shows unsaved changes on the real frontend without leaving the editor.
• Fix: publishing settings can no longer overwrite sibling options of the theme's options root with filtered values.
• Fix: element colorize options (Coloration Level) now live-preview inside the editor canvas and the Live Site preview.
• Fix: page transitions play inside the Live Site preview when the active theme supports them.
• Performance: the editor payload is smaller and preview boards render on demand.
• Maintenance: PHPUnit 10, WordPress 6.9 stubs, refreshed build toolchain; the PHP test suite runs again.

2.2.13

• Security: constrain and escape the dark-mode appearance attribute printed on the site's <html> tag.
• Isolate the WUpdates self-update mechanism so it can be excluded from WordPress.org-targeted builds.

2.2.12

• Apply connected fields presets when switching font palettes that define a palette-specific preset.
• Preserve nested font palette metadata when cloud palettes are combined with local partial overrides.

2.2.11

• Add Voice Tuner controls to sort font palettes by personality fit.
• Restore original palette ordering when the tuner returns to balanced.
• Preserve Voice Tuner scoring on current installs where local palette overrides omit personality metadata.
• Refresh font palette cards with richer live preview typography.

2.2.10

• Consolidated release from beta streams.
• WordPress 7.0 compatibility updates for the iframed block editor and safer Customizer cross-frame behavior.
• Safari fix for multi-variant font selection in Customizer (fallback when requestIdleCallback is unavailable).
• Improved dark mode propagation into the block editor iframe.
• Modernized build and CI pipeline (Node 22, PHP 8.1+, deterministic zip validation).

2.2.9

• Ensure full compatibility with PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5 (zero deprecation notices)
• Update symfony polyfill dependency version constraints for PHP 8.2+ compatibility
• Add PHP 8.1 downgrade set to Rector build pipeline

2.2.8

• 2026-02-09
• Upgrade Carbon Fields library to version 3.6.9 for WordPress 6.2+ compatibility (React 18).
• Fix Settings page not rendering fields on WordPress 6.2+.
• Fix PHP 8.2 ReturnTypeWillChange deprecation notices from Carbon Fields.
• Security: sanitize $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in exception message.
• Security: replace $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] with global $pagenow.
• Security: add capability check to AJAX migration handler.
• Security: cast sm_site_color_variation to integer in JS output.
• Security: escape RadioImage control colors, labels, and data attributes.
• Tested with WordPress 6.9.1.

2.2.7

• 2022-06-16
• Improvements to design assets handling.
• Improvements to fonts handling on the frontend of your site.
• Fix for fonts controls styling.
• Fix site color variation controls.

2.2.6

• 2022-06-07
• Fix for migrating parent theme theme_mods to the child theme in order to keep your customizations.

2.2.5

• 2022-06-03
• Fix edge-case bug when the Customizer preview would not update with new fonts.
• Styling fixes for Customizer controls.
• Fix cache invalidation after Pixelgrade Care Starter Content import.
• Test with the latest WordPress version (6.0).

2.2.4

• 2022-05-06
• Fix inconsistencies in the block editor.
• Test with the latest WordPress version.

2.2.3

• 2022-04-20
• Fix CSS output for legacy color palettes

2.2.2

• 2022-04-19
• Ensure compatibility with PHP 8.0

2.2.1

• 2022-04-19
• Improve backwards compatibility
• Bug fixes and style improvements

2.2.0

• 2022-04-15
• Improve Color Palettes module
• Improve Fonts Palettes module
• Improve integration with the block editor and the full-site editor
• Lots of fixes and performance improvements
• Ensure compatibility with Nova Blocks 2.0+
• Ensure WordPress 5.9+ compatibility
• Update Carbon Fields library to version 3.3+

2.1.1

• 2021-12-14
• Fixes a CSS selector specificity issue introduced with 2.1.0

2.1.0

• 2021-12-06
• Introduces data migration when switching data store location from plugin settings
• Fixes bug in Color Palettes
• Invalidate caches after demo data import
• Increase minimum PHP version to 7.1 and WordPress version to 5.5.0
• Tested with the latest WordPress version (5.8.2)

2.0.7

• 2021-08-16
• Expose palettes configuration to frontend and block editor through the styleManager global object

2.0.6

• 2021-08-05
• Fixed issues with Customizer menus section styling.

2.0.5

• 2021-08-02
• Fixed a fatal PHP error on activation on certain PHP versions.
• Fixed issues with Customizer preview links
• Fixed feedback form

2.0.4

• 2021-07-21
• Tested with the latest WordPress version (5.8).
• Fix for custom fonts with custom source URLs.

2.0.3

• 2021-07-20
• Fixes scripts enqueue errors.

2.0.2

• 2021-07-16
• Minor fix for range fields to properly display their actual value

2.0.1

• 2021-07-14
• Minor fix for font controls.

2.0

• 2021-07-12
• Complete rewrite and overhaul of the styling logic. Better in every way.

1.0

• 2018-07-18
• Initial release