Stoat is in the WordPress.org theme directory, so the shortest route never leaves your dashboard.
From the dashboard
- Appearance → Themes → Add New.
- Search for Stoat.
- Install, then Activate.
That is the whole installation. There is no companion plugin to install, no licence key, and no demo content to import.
From a zip
If you downloaded stoat.zip from wordpress.org/themes/stoat:
- Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme.
- Choose
stoat.zip, then Install Now. - Activate.
With WP-CLI
wp theme install stoat --activate
Requirements
| WordPress | 6.5 or newer |
| PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| Anything else | no |
Stoat is tested against WordPress 7.0. On WordPress 7.0 and newer the Font Library is available, which is how you add a font of your own; below that the theme falls back to the system font stack and the built-in web-safe families.
The first five minutes
Once the theme is active, three settings are worth doing before anything else.
1. A menu. Appearance → Menus (or Customize → Menus) → create a menu and tick Primary Menu. Until something is assigned there the header shows the logo and the hamburger and nothing between them. Two levels deep is the sweet spot — see the primary menu.
2. What the front page is. Settings → Reading. Your latest posts makes the front page the blog listing; A static page lets you pick a homepage and a separate posts page. See the front page.
3. The widths. Customize → Layout. The default is a 640px reading column inside an 1170px container, with archives, pages and posts all set to Narrow. A news site usually wants archives on Full. See narrow or full.
Then
- Where every option lives — the map of the Customizer.
- Logo and site title.
- Header layout.