Left for HTMLy

Left is a bold red-and-gold editorial theme for HTMLy, built on Marx, the classless CSS reset by Matthew Blode. It combines warm paper textures, a strong header, card-based post listings, serif long-form typography, responsive navigation, centered social links, and a dependency-free article image lightbox.

Install

1. Extract the ZIP.
2. Upload the left folder to your HTMLy themes/ directory.
3. In HTMLy Admin, open Config and select Left as the active theme.
4. Save the configuration and clear HTMLy's cache if an older theme version is still rendered.

Expected path:

themes/
└── left/
    ├── css/
    │   ├── marx.min.css
    │   └── style.css
    ├── js/
    │   └── theme.js
    ├── 404.html.php
    ├── 404-search.html.php
    ├── layout.html.php
    ├── main.html.php
    ├── no-posts.html.php
    ├── post.html.php
    ├── profile.html.php
    ├── static.html.php
    ├── substatic.html.php
    └── theme.json

Design

• Deep red and gold visual palette with a warm paper-style background.
• Initial-only navbar branding derived from the HTMLy Blog Title.
• Responsive primary navigation and native HTMLy search.
• Editorial homepage hero and card-based post list.
• Clear post metadata with min read, categories, tags, and breadcrumbs.
• Serif typography for long-form article content.
• Centered HTMLy social links and footer credit.
• Click-to-expand article image lightbox with keyboard and Escape support.
• Responsive layouts for desktop and mobile.

HTMLy compatibility

• Uses HTMLy's standard PHP theme templates and native helpers.
• Supports HTMLy's built-in image, YouTube, SoundCloud, quote, and link post types.
• Keeps breadcrumbs, author/profile pages, related posts, previous/next navigation, edit links, comments, analytics, social links, and optional widgets.
• Includes substatic.html.php as a compatible fallback for static subpages.
• Uses only a small local JavaScript file for responsive navigation and the image lightbox.
• Does not require a CDN.

Marx CSS

Left bundles Marx 5.3.2 locally as css/marx.min.css. The Marx stylesheet is kept as the upstream distribution and is used as the classless CSS foundation beneath Left's custom presentation layer in css/style.css.

Marx is created by Matthew Blode and distributed under the MIT License. Its license is included in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSE.md.

Marx 5 compatibility

Marx 5 introduced cascade layers, zero-specificity base rules, a new --marx-* design-token API, and automatic light/dark color-scheme behavior. Left maps its red-and-gold palette to the new Marx tokens and explicitly keeps a light color scheme so the existing Left visual identity remains consistent. Left's own unlayered css/style.css continues to override the classless Marx foundation cleanly.

Marx 5 targets modern Baseline 2024 browsers. Older browsers may not receive every modern enhancement, but the upstream stylesheet is designed to degrade to a readable light presentation.

Asset caching

The three asset URLs in layout.html.php carry a cache-buster derived from each file's own modification time, so the value changes whenever the file does and stays put when it does not. Updating the theme is therefore enough on its own to invalidate a stale stylesheet or script; there is no version string to bump and nothing to purge by hand.

If you edit css/style.css, css/marx.min.css or js/theme.js in place on a live site, the new URL is picked up on the next page render. Clear HTMLy's own page cache if an older page is still being served, since that cache stores the rendered HTML — including the old URL — rather than the assets.

License

The Left theme is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

Marx is a separate work by Matthew Blode, also distributed under the MIT License; its notice is kept in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSE.md.