This site is a working example of two things made by Dixith Labs: Alaya, a free WordPress theme, and Alaya Pro, a plugin that adds to it. Everything you read here was written for this site, so that you can see the theme and the plugin doing their work on real pages.
Alaya, the theme
A theme decides how a site looks: the type, the colours, the width of the column you read in, the bar at the top and the footer. Alaya is made for long reading, in English and in Indian languages. It carries its own fonts for Kannada, Devanagari and other Indian scripts, so a page in Kannada is drawn with the same care as a page in English. It has a light look and a dark one; try the gear at the top of the page. And it fetches nothing from any other site: no fonts, no scripts, no tracking.
Alaya is free. Get Alaya from the Dixith Labs Store.
Alaya Pro, the plugin
A theme is a way of looking at a site. Some things a publication needs should stay even when the look changes, and those belong in a plugin. On this site every part of Alaya Pro is switched on, so you can see each one:
- A contents list at the top of a long piece, made from its own headings. See A river town at first light.
- Reading time that counts Kannada and Devanagari correctly, which most word counters do not. Look under the title of ನಿಧಾನವಾಗಿ ಓದುವ ಸುಖ.
- Share, print and PDF, in the row under each title. The printed page carries a heading, the full address and a QR code.
- More than one writer on a piece, with a box for each. What the margin is for has two.
- Writer profiles for people who have no account on the site, each with a page of their own.
- Related reading at the end of every piece.
- Links between articles, made as the page is drawn. An article names the words it should be found by, and other articles link to it wherever those words appear, without anyone editing the text.
- Sharing cards and search tags, so a link pasted into a chat arrives with a title and a summary, and search engines can tell who wrote what.
- Coloured cards for notes, key points and cautions inside an article.
- Breadcrumbs, showing where a piece sits on the site.
- A plain contact form, on the Contact page.
Alaya Pro works on any block theme, including the ones that come with WordPress. It does not need Alaya, and Alaya does not need it. They are shown together here because each was made with the other in mind. See Alaya Pro in the Dixith Labs Store.
Each one stands on its own
Take the plugin away and this site would keep working, only without the parts listed above. Put the plugin on another block theme and those parts go with it, with a small stylesheet of their own so they still look tidy. Nothing in one of them checks for the other.
What to read first
- For the theme at its plainest, an essay: Why read slowly.
- For a long piece with a contents list and cards: A river town at first light.
- For a series read in order, with links from part to part: Learning Kannada script, part 1.
- For verses with Vedic accent marks: The first hymn, with its accents.
- For Kannada: ಮಳೆಗಾಲದ ಒಂದು ಸಂಜೆ.
A word about the writing
The pieces on this site were written for it, in English and in Kannada. The writers named under them are invented, so that you can see how writer boxes and profiles look, and the places in the travel pieces are put together from several towns. There are no photographs: we would rather show none than use pictures we have no right to. More about this on the About page.