Automattic has published its Lettre theme to WordPress.org. The company launched its newsletter product at the end of December 2022 using Lettre as the default theme. The self-hosted version of this block theme is for those who want to publish a newsletter using Jetpack.

The theme puts the focus on the subscription form, which is the most important thing a newsletter landing page can do – make it easy for people to sign up. Beneath the form there is a link to read all the posts, followed by another subscription form. All of these elements in the home page design are blocks, making it easy for them to be removed or rearranged.

Lettre comes with 15 block patterns for building different pages and designs, including about the author(s), a bold color signup, a two-column signup, various designs for the newsletter intro with light and dark background images, newsletter signup with media on the left, newsletter signup with logos for the background, a list of posts, an in-post article promo, three columns of text, and more.

A live demo of the theme is available on WordPress.com. The menu items on the demo give a few examples of the different signup patterns in action.

Lettre is designed to be used with Jetpack’s Subscription block, which uses WordPress.com’s infrastructure to manage emails and subscribers. If you like the design but are already using another newsletter service, the Jetpack Subscribe block can be replaced with any other block, including the shortcode block for newsletter services that haven’t yet made their subscription forms available via a block. Be advised, you may need to write some custom CSS to ensure that the subscribe form matches the original design.

Lettre is one of the only themes in the WordPress Themes Directory that was made to be a newsletter landing page and certainly the only block theme dedicated to this purpose. Combined with Jetpack’s subscription feature, this is one of the most seamless ways to distribute a newsletter without all the extra steps of copying the content into a newsletter service’s editor. Lettre is available for free download from WordPress.org. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more themes like this pop up now that WordPress.com has launched its newsletter service.