Eighteen dark themes, a page for your bio link, and a top bar that says what it does

Hi there,

Last time your site learned to tell you where your visitors come from. This time there are three things, and you'll meet them in about this order: the editor looks different the moment you open it, there are themes that aren't white, and there's now somewhere better to point your Instagram bio.

New Dark Themes

Every theme myMat has ever offered has been light. That was never a design position — it's just where we started, and it quietly meant that if the way you teach reads as candlelit, restorative, evening, nobody had built you a site that looked like it.

There are now 18 dark themes alongside the 21 light ones.

Open Theme & fonts and you'll find two tabs: Light and Dark. It opens on whichever one holds the theme you're already using, so you never land on a screenful of swatches with nothing selected, wondering where your site went.

These aren't the light themes with the brightness turned down. Each was chosen as a pair — background and text together — which matters more than it sounds. Going dark is the change most likely to break a page in one specific corner while looking fine everywhere else: a footer that stays pale, a contact form dropdown still painted white, a heading that vanishes into the sheet behind it. We went through every one of those surfaces (there's a list further down of the ones that were wrong) so that a dark theme is dark all the way through.

There's also a new theme called Editorial, and it's now where a brand-new site starts. Your site is untouched — the default only decides where someone begins on day one.

Your New Link In Bio

You have one link on Instagram. One on Facebook. And you've been spending it on a compromise — either your homepage, where the thing you're actually promoting sits somewhere below the fold, or one of those link-in-bio services that looks like a completely different product to the person who just tapped it.

You now have a third option, and it's yours: yourname.mymat.yoga/links.

Open the account menu in your editor and choose Quick links. Add the things you most want tapped, drag them into order, publish.

Three things make it worth the five minutes:

It looks like your site, because it is your site. Same theme, same fonts, same buttons, same colours. A student tapping through from your story doesn't arrive somewhere unfamiliar — they arrive somewhere that reads as yours. Change your theme and your links page changes with it. (Including to a dark one.)

Rows can point at your own retreats and workshops rather than at a pasted address. Press Add from my site and your published events are right there, one tap each. A row added that way keeps itself honest: it carries the date underneath without you typing one, it follows the event if you rename it, and when that retreat sells out and you take its page down, the row disappears on its own. No stale link sitting in your bio for three weeks pointing at something that no longer exists.

Every row counts its own taps. They're listed beside each link in the editor, including the zeros — because a row nobody taps is the useful thing to know, and it's exactly what an average would hide. Counted the same cookieless way as your site visits: nothing tracked, nothing stored about the person tapping, no banner on the page.

Three layouts to pick from — a centred stack, a raised card, or a masthead with your photo and name side by side. They're arrangements of the same pieces, so switching is a click and never a redesign. And your social icons come from the ones already on your site, so there's one place to keep them current instead of two.

A top bar that says what it does

The editor's header had been accumulating. Buttons arrived one at a time, each sensible on its own, until the row was a line of small grey icons you had to hover to identify — and it mixed two completely different kinds of thing: your account and your site's own navigation, side by side, as if they were the same subject.

It's now two rows, and the split is the whole idea.

The top row is about your account and your site as a thing you own. Your address, with a copy button. A Live or Draft badge. Visitors, with your 30-day count on it. Settings. Your photo. And exactly one filled button — always whatever you should do next, so it reads Publish while you're in draft and View site once you're live.

Every tool in that row is named. No unlabelled icons, no hovering to find out. That was a deliberate rule rather than a tidy-up, and so was this one: new features go into the menu under your photo, never onto the bar. It's the reason the bar was able to get crowded once, and the reason it won't again.

The second row is your site. Not an approximation of it — your actual site name, your actual menu items, your actual social icons, in your theme's colours and your theme's heading font. Previously this row was painted in myMat's indigo and myMat's typeface, which made it the one part of the editor actively lying to you about what a visitor sees. If you're on a dark theme, this is where you'll notice the difference most.

And it no longer squashes. If your section titles run long — "What Our Students Say", "Workshops & Retreats" — the row used to hit a wall and, rather than dropping one item, squeeze every item until the whole menu double-decked at once. Overflow now tucks behind a More button instead, on your site as well as in the editor, at exactly the width where it's needed. "Book Now" deliberately stays out in the open — a booking button hidden behind a menu is worse than a tight menu.

Clicking your own name at the top of that menu opens your account: photo, name, email and password, in one panel. These used to be spread across three places, and the easiest one to find was the one that didn't work — it accepted your name, told you it had saved, and changed nothing. That page is gone. Changing your email now asks for your current password first, as it always should have.

Your photo is also now set once and used everywhere. Previously the only way to set one was buried inside the links editor, which meant most teachers had none — and anyone who'd never opened that section had a /links page with no name and no face on it at all, on the surface most likely to end up in an Instagram bio. If you still don't have one, you'll see your initial in a circle rather than a gap.

Smaller editor things

Character counters are back. Class descriptions, event descriptions, offerings and testimonials all show the room you have left, and tell you which field is over before you press Save rather than after. The event detail page's description is counted too, so you can't write something there that the site editor will later refuse.
Escape closes whatever you're editing — all of it, everywhere, not just the one section where it happened to work.
Every field on setup is properly labelled, which matters if you use a screen reader and is invisible if you don't.

Things that were quietly wrong

Most of the last two weeks went here. None of it is glamorous; all of it is the sort of thing that makes a page feel almost right in a way that's hard to name. Much of it surfaced while making the dark themes hold together.

Bold text and links in your bio were invisible. On any theme, bold words and links in your About section were painted the same colour as the background behind them — not hard to read, absent. Fixed on every surface that shows your bio.
Dark themes are legible throughout. The editor's preview, its sidebar headings, your contact form and its Subject dropdown were all painting themselves light-on-light.
Your footer links sit on one row instead of wrapping into three ragged ones beside an empty column.
Your social icons are the right size, in both headers, and their tap targets now clear the accessibility minimum — which the editor's had been failing.
Your Offerings line up with the rest of your page, in a single grid that scales with the window instead of leaving the bottom row stranded narrow.
Your page has one gutter. Sections were indented by two different containers, so the hero could drift out of line with everything below it.
Testimonial stars sit on one row, in your theme's colour.
Your testimonial carousel works again. The dots now follow the slide showing, and — the real bug — moving your cursor across it once stopped the rotation permanently, for the life of the page. Hovering still pauses it, as it should. It just starts again when you move away.

Also, under the hood

Built a browser test suite that drives the real editor and a real published site side by side, so the two can't quietly drift apart again. Most of the list above was found by writing it.
Deleted the last of the old editor's forms, and a duplicate character counter that disagreed with itself about its own limit.
Moved our mailing-list integration onto its official library, and fixed the error handling that had been hiding behind our own copy of it.
Stopped shipping 62 test files to your browser on every page load.

Your two minutes this week

Open Theme & fonts and press Dark. Even if you stay light, it's worth seeing what your site looks like.
Account menu → Quick links. Add the one thing you most want people to tap, publish, and paste yourname.mymat.yoga/links into your Instagram bio.
Click your own name at the top of that menu and add a photo.

As always, if something looks wrong on your site specifically, message us through the support chat in the editor and we'll look at your setup.

— Jim & Michelle, the myMat team