Cover ledger

The cover's own content positions (bottom left, bottom center) were not used. A custom content position sets the cover's inner container to width: auto, so it shrink-wraps to its content; a plate carrying a long paragraph fills its measure anyway, which is why cover-plate can use one, but a ledger of short numbers would shrink to the width of its words, and to a different width in every theme's typeface. So the cover keeps core's default centring, which keeps the inner container at width: 100%, and the first group inside it is a vertical flex stack with min-height: 34rem (the same value as the cover's floor), justifyContent: stretch and verticalAlignment: bottom. The stack fills the cover, its one child (a constrained wrapper at contentSize: 1240px, which picks up the theme's root padding and so sits at the theme's gutter) is pushed to the floor, and the columns inside it span the measure at every width. A buyer raising the cover's height changes minHeight on the cover AND min-height on that first group; they are the same number on purpose.

Type never sits on a photograph. Every word is on a plate whose ground is a base chain and whose type is a contrast chain, and every paragraph states its own text colour rather than inheriting the plate's, so a theme's element styles cannot repaint it. The contrast gate measures it as type on a guaranteed pair. The veil over the photograph is decoration; it may recede without loss. The cover states its own text colour (base) so that core's :where() rule, which would otherwise paint any text in it #fff, never fires; nothing sits outside the plates today, and the chain is there so that nothing a buyer adds does either without a colour of its own.

The photograph. The cover ships EMPTY, which is valid at WordPress 6.6 and 7.0: click the cover, choose an image from the media library, and set the focal point high, since the foot is covered by the ledger. Then the three numbers and their labels; a label reads best under 22 characters so it holds one line on every plate, and the line under it under about 60 characters so the three plates stay the same height. The line is optional: delete the third paragraph from every plate, not from one.

• Ink ledger: the plates invert, contrast ground and base type. The same ledger, more weight, for a photograph that is mostly light. The veil is unchanged.
• In motion: backgroundType: "video". The same ledger over a clip. The cover ships empty here too (an empty video cover is valid at both versions and saves as the veil over the inner container); choose a short, silent, looping clip in the cover's media picker. Core writes the <video> with autoplay muted loop playsinline, which is what iOS requires to play inline without a gesture. Nothing about the plates changes.

The cover's minHeight is 34rem, never a vh value. The storefront's stage sizes its frame to the pattern, and a viewport-relative height would size the pattern to the frame in turn; that loop only ever shrinks. rem also means the section is the same height in every theme at a given root size. The veil is dimRatio: 40 rather than a value between tens because core ships an opacity rule only for multiples of ten; has-background-dim-35 would match no rule and fall back to 50%.

Editor round-trip on WordPress 6.6.7 and 7.0.4 (2026-08-21): base and both variations valid, and the reserialised markup a fixed point of each authored file on both versions (after the editor's harmless -- escaping). Both versions write a video cover's backgroundType key after isUserOverlayColor, not after dimRatio; the file ships that order. Render, contrast and responsive measurements are run centrally for the cover batch and are filed under docs/verification/ by date.

A full-bleed cover on its own fills the storefront's stage edge to edge, and on a buyer's page it is never alone either. So the pattern ships with what comes next: a short row on your theme's paper under the cover, a tracked label and one paragraph at a 34rem measure. It is ordinary page copy, it shows where the cover ENDS, and it is the first thing a buyer rewrites or deletes. It carries the same chains as everything else.

Off the theme's ladder on purpose, because the size is the composition:

• paragraph at clamp(2.5rem, 4.6vw, 4rem)