Hooray

Categories as separately branded sections

Plenty of blog themes give you one accent colour and apply it everywhere. Hooray's vendor feature list says each category can carry custom colours and a custom logo, and the description adds icons and backgrounds for those category treatments. Main menu items can also take their own icons.

That changes how you plan a multi-topic blog. A writer running essays, reviews and a photo journal can give each section a recognisable header and palette, so a reader arriving from a category archive knows where they are before reading a headline. It also means the visual identity is managed at the category level in the admin rather than through a child stylesheet.

The limit worth noting: this is a vendor description of category-level settings. The demo is the place to see how far the treatment extends, and how much of the page a category colour actually reaches.

Widgets as named display blocks

The vendor counts more than 30 custom widgets, and the list is specific rather than padded with duplicates: a social counter, an about-the-author box with social links, a review widget, News in Pictures, a posts slider, a timeline, category posts, a tabbed widget, advertisement widgets, and feed widgets for Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and SoundCloud.

The distinction matters when you compare themes. A theme with unlimited generic sidebars still leaves you assembling blocks; this one ships blocks that already know what they display. A review widget, for example, is a different object from a list of recent posts, and placing it in a sidebar or footer is a layout decision instead of a build task.

Sidebars themselves are described as unlimited, with sticky sidebar behaviour available and switchable off per page, according to the vendor.

A review system inside the blog

Hooray includes a review system that outputs stars and percentages, and the vendor lists schema markup with rich snippet microdata for both articles and reviews. Review entries also have their own widget, and the widget posts grid can sort by best reviews.

For a writer who reviews books, gear or software alongside ordinary essays, that means the rating is part of the post rather than a separate plugin's shortcode pasted into the body.

One honest boundary: schema markup is what the theme prints. Whether a search engine shows stars against your result is decided by the search engine and by whether the markup matches the visible page. Treat the microdata as a starting condition, not a guaranteed outcome.

What the theme adds to a long read

The vendor's list leans on reading experience in ways a personal blog rarely bothers with: a posts read progress bar, an estimated read time, and a reading position indicator, which the changelog records as an option added in version 2.0.0.

Pagination can load more posts or run infinitely over Ajax, with an on/off setting, and related posts are fetched over Ajax by category, tag or author. Video posts can open in a lightbox from the featured slider, the post carousel, the widget posts grid and the related posts area, per the vendor.

These choices suit a site where people read articles rather than scan a home page. They are also the sort of thing you should feel in a demo before committing, since a progress bar or infinite scroll either matches your reading rhythm or annoys you in daily use.

Six blog layouts and three portfolio layouts

Hooray lists six blog layouts: Classic, Large, Masonry in two columns, Masonry two columns with a sidebar, Masonry three columns and Masonry four columns. Separately it lists three masonry portfolio layouts at two, three and four columns.

Having both matters if you publish written work and visual work. A photo series or a project gallery can use the portfolio layout while the blog keeps a classic column, and the wide masonry options are the ones you would apply to an archive where images carry the page.

The count of layouts is a vendor declaration, and the demo is where you check whether a layout's typography and spacing match how you want your own posts presented.

Age, declared compatibility and what to verify

The marketplace listing records the vendor's last update as 20 February 2023, and the changelog included in the description ends at version 2.6.3 on 6 March 2020 — so the most recent documented changes are fixes and minor bug fixes rather than new features. The theme's maintenance history before that is dense: WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg compatibility plus JSON-LD structured data in 2.5.1, WooCommerce function updates in 2.5.0, and automatic theme updates in 2.6.2.

As observed on 4 November 2026, the listing declares Gutenberg Optimized as Yes, compatibility with bbPress 2.5.x, WordPress support spanning 4.9.x through the 7.x line, responsive and high-resolution layouts, widget readiness, and package files of PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Those are marketplace and vendor declarations, not results from testing on your install.

For a site you expect to keep for years, the practical move is to test the theme against the current WordPress and plugin versions you rely on before you build a lot of content on top of it.

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