Shrinking developer team (8 to 2), growing feature requests, political instability, and funding cuts – these are some of the biggest challenges Mateus Machado Luna and his team were facing while growing Tainacan – their powerful digital archive management plugin.
On top of all that, they were maintaining a full-fledged in-house theme called Tainacan Interface that let Tainacan users customize the plugin’s archive and single item templates.
“I had to offer support to users, keep evolving the plugin, and still maintain the official theme. I only then realized how complicated it was to keep a good WordPress theme.
The amount of things you have to consider to tackle the multiple usage scenarios is no joke. From multiple layouts to SEO, A11Y, performance… I already had too much on my plate from the plugin side.” – Mateus Luna
To refocus on plugin development, Mateus and his team began looking for a powerful external theme that isn’t just SEO-friendly, accessible, and fast, but also supports advanced customizations and integrates deeply with a custom post type-driven (CPT) plugin like Tainacan.
Finding a WordPress Theme With Advanced Customization & Deep Custom Post Types (CPT) Integration Capabilities
After trying several popular themes, Tainacan settled on the Blocksy Theme because it’s built on the foundations of WordPress Blocks – modular building units that allow very advanced customizations to posts, pages, and custom post types like archives as well as single item pages.
Mateus recalls that the Gutenberg Editor had already launched, and blocks were becoming the foundational framework. The shift to full site editing would be slow, so they knew they had to rely on a block-based theme instead.
“I wanted something that was clearly getting in shape for the Block Editor world. A theme that would not ‘fight it,’ while still offering its own way into the existing features of WordPress.” – Mateus Luna
That’s what Mateus and his team found in Blocksy – a theme built around blocks instead of treating them as an afterthought.
“Blocksy’s version of the Customizer shines. It understands how the WordPress UI needs work, and it improves it hugely, without making the theme alien to Gutenberg Editor features such as the block-editor panel and Blocksy’s own blocks. Blocksy’s vision of the Customizer has kept WordPress theming rock solid for a variety of projects we’ve been working on.” – Mateus Luna
Blocksy’s Customizer also came with built-in support for custom post types, and since Tainacan archives are CPTs, this meant deep compatibility out of the box.
Mateus could use Blocksy’s filters (hooks) to add new features and capabilities to allow customization of Tainacan’s archive and single item pages.
“That was the turning point, because I realized they had prepared their code to be extended by others, which is part of the best practices of the WordPress philosophy. This made me realize it was worth spending time there.” – Mateus Luna
Citing an example, Mateus says Tainacan lists categories and their values, and if a user wants the display to look more like a traditional WordPress post listing, he could just customize Blocksy’s existing archive templates to achieve that design.
Other reasons that sealed the deal between Tainacan and Blocksy were the theme’s extreme attention to performance, serious care with accessibility, support for popular page builders (like Elementor), and theme developers really listening to users.
Building CPT-Driven Archive & Single Item Pages With Blocksy For Multiple Cultural Institutions
With the Blocksy Theme handling front-end customizations, Mateus and the Tainacan team went on to build CPT-driven, visually distinct, on-brand websites for several Brazilian cultural institutes (from museums to artist archives) without having to create custom themes for each.
“I think the best way to see how Blocksy was part of the stack is by comparing the design in each project. The fact that they look so different from one another is kinda our proof of success; it is why we wanted to make Tainacan in WordPress, so cultural institutions could express content the way it fits for them.” – Mateus Luna
Museu Paulista
Mateus and his team created archive and single item pages for Museu Paulista – one of Brazil’s most important museums. The museum already had a public-facing website at Museu do Ipiranga. Tainacan had to replicate its layout to create pages for Paulista.
Using Blocksy’s custom CPT options, Tainacan created a curated content-style landing page for the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil and archive-style pages for the Iconographic Documents and the Sticker Album of the 1932 Revolution. Each archive page has advanced search, filters, dropdowns, and next/previous navigation.
Ziraldo
The Tainacan team was commissioned to build archive pages for Ziraldo – one of Brazil’s most relevant cartoonists, painters, and comic creators. They had to adhere to the client’s proposed visual identity.
The team achieved the desired result by using Tainacan and Blocksy hooks and feature extensions to create the Ziraldo Collection. The pages have Tainacan’s signature advanced search and filter options.
They also built another archive page called Highlights, displaying individual items.
SESI Lab
Tainacan took on the challenge of building a digital archive for SESI Lab – a museum dedicated to arts, science, and technology in Brazil. They have a vibrant website with interactive, colorful content, and the digital archive had to reflect that spirit. The pages Tainacan had to build required multiple shifting visual identities, including color palettes, layout style, typography, and narrative.
Tainacan leaned on Blocksy for the visual aspects, and on Greenshift animation and page builder blocks to build the digital archive and shifting pages like Biocanomia Amazonica and The Future of Professions.
Other prominent clients Tainacan built full archive and single item pages with Blocksy include Museu Boulieu (a traditional museum website), Revista Zupi (an art magazine archive), Visite Museus (a Ministry of Culture platform where museums promote their events), and Bem Brasileiro (a digital repository for Brazil’s historic and artistic heritage).
Building a Dedicated Integration Plugin (Tainacan Support for Blocksy) For Reusable, Site-Wide Customizations
Since Blocksy is built to be extended, Mateus and the Tainacan team used its hooks and filters to create an add-on plugin called Tainacan Support for Blocksy (TSB), giving Tainacan users advanced layout control.
The plugin grew out of a recurring problem – the team had to keep rebuilding the same custom features in the Blocksy Child Theme for each client website. With TSB, the repeated work became a one-time custom setup that users could turn on and tweak.
Before TSB, Tainacan users could access a few search components like filters, advanced search, and different viewing modes on full archive pages.
After installing TSB, Tainacan users gained access to a whole lot of new settings like color palettes, header customization, search control display customization, and filter behavior.
Before TSB, Tainacan users could only add custom structured metadata (using a custom form) to single item pages.
After installing TSB, Tainacan users gained granular control over how items are displayed on the page. Users could make changes to title appearance, add banner or feature images, set content wide, narrow, or with a sidebar, add next/previous navigation, related items, comment sections, etc.
On top of all this, TSB lets users configure customizations for different screen sizes (desktop, tablet, mobile) on the same page.
“I’ve had mostly positive feedback about the sites where I used this stack (Tainacan + TSB). When combined with a good visual identity, the theme really ‘brings life’ to digital archives that could before look a bit tedious or too technical.” – Mateus Luna
Leaning on a Powerful Theme Like Blocksy Helps Boost Delivery & Reduces Updating Risks
Tainacan’s answer to common CPT-plugin problems (teams stretched thin, in-house theme building and maintenance eating into plugin development) was to lean on a powerful, dependable theme like Blocksy, freeing up time to focus on core plugin development.
Mateus points to two tangible benefits since adopting Blocksy in their tech stack: accelerated delivery speed and peace of mind!
“Certainly, the speed of delivery once I learned all the ways of customizing things. In terms of maintenance, I’ve never had any strong worries about upgrading the plugin and theme version, except with some migration needed from version 1.x to 2.x, but that was well communicated by the developers.”
– Mateus Luna
