Table of Contents
Before the version you can download today, I built three others. I released none of them.
They worked. They were fast. They looked decent. I deleted all three.
Not because they were broken, but because none of them were considerably better than what Spinoko v2 already was. I was thinking if I was going to change something that works, it has to be a clear improvement, not a slightly nicer version of the same thing. Three times I got to the end, and decided it didn't clear that bar.
Spinoko v2 is a good theme
Spinoko v2 did its job well. Over the years I got a lot of feedback, public and private, about it being easy to use, fast, modern, and converting well. People built real businesses on it. It earned its years.
But it started to look dated. I knew it, and the same users who liked it were telling me the same thing.
Why simply changing it didn't work
Each of those three unreleased attempts was built on the existing codebase, trying to change it, improve it, add to it.
The problem is that Spinoko is a specific theme doing a specific job. You can't meaningfully change how it looks without changing what's underneath it: custom fields, post types, templates, the way data moves between them. Every visual change I wanted ran into a structural decision I'd made years earlier.
So I'd work around it. And those pile up really quickly.
It kind of worked. It looked fine, it ran fine. But I didn't like the code I was writing, and it didn't feel right. This might be a hard thing to justify to anyone else, but when you're the only person maintaining something for years, "I don't like this code" is a real thing.
The part where I was wrong
When WordPress block themes were first announced, I looked at them. I build WP products, so I'm always curious about what's coming. And I really disliked them.
To me it looked like a feature aimed at end users, something that needed no developer at all. You can change anything you want in the template - what do you need me for? And I stayed in my PHP templates, where I had total control and everything worked exactly how I decided it should.
Over time the block themes got better. The Site Editor got a lot better. I started not to dislike using it. But I still had the impression it wasn't really a place where development happened.
Meanwhile custom fields were kind of getting left behind. Editing a casino page meant working in a clean, native, modern editor at the top, and then scrolling down to a custom fields panel that felt like it had been pasted in from a different website. Nothing about it matched the experience of everything above it.
There was one more thing keeping me out: everything new in WordPress is built on React. I'm not a React developer and I didn't particularly want to become one. My PHP world was comfortable.
It took a couple of serious attempts before I actually understood it. Not just how it works, but how much you can do with it, and that building this way can be as enjoyable as the old way.
That's when I decided Spinoko v3 would be a block theme, using the Site Editor properly, without giving up a single feature people liked about v2.
What that means if you're not a developer
All of the above was my problem, not yours. Here's what it actually brings you.
Your header, your footer, every template on your website is editable in the WordPress editor. No child theme. No PHP. No hiring me.
Does this sound familiar? You wanted to change the GambleAware logo in the footer, and you had to find the docs that explained how to do it with a code snippet, or you had to open a ticket. Not any more. Add any logo you want, move it left or right, make it bigger or smaller, all in the editor.
Now every casino element is a native block. Listings, ratings, bonus boxes, CTAs. You move them around the same way you move a paragraph.
You can build your own templates and patterns, reuse them anywhere, and they still look native to the theme because they're built from the same blocks.
And the custom fields problem is gone. There's nothing at the bottom of the pages any more - casino and slot details are edited in native WP sidebar panels.
Breaking compatibility, and why
In all these years I've never broken backward compatibility. Once I came close, and I shipped a migration script that handled it.
v3 is different. There are scripts, and they do most of the work: they export your v2 casino data, import it into v3, convert the obvious blocks, and tell you which pages need manual checking. But they need oversight. Two themes this different can't be bridged by automation alone.
I went ahead anyway, because the alternative was a v3 shaped by v2's limitations, and that's exactly the thing I'd already failed at 3 times.
Your v2 site keeps working. There's no deadline and nothing expires. If you want to move, the migration guide covers it.
What's in it
v3 has everything v2 had, plus a good deal more. The one thing that didn't make it is AMP support, and if it were up to me, I'd remove that from v2 as well.
The new things I'd point at first: Casino Vault, Data Imports, Demo Import, and a lot of blocks, patterns and templates.
Casino Vault is the one that stands out and you won't find anything like that in any casino affiliate theme. V3 ships with a live search over 400+ real casinos: search, click import, and the casino gets imported with its rating, logo, and every other field already filled in. Data Imports does the same for payment methods, games, providers, restricted countries and currencies. An empty install becomes a data-full website in minutes instead of days.
A small thing that explains the whole rewrite
Most affiliates cloak their links. Nonaki is my free plugin that does it, and it's been used alongside Spinoko for years.
Usually you'd go to the Nonaki settings page, create your link, copy it, go back to the casino page, paste it into a custom field. Works fine. Everybody does it.
Now there's a button next to every affiliate link field. Click it, a small popup opens on the same casino edit page, you create the link there and save. It's stored in Nonaki and filled into your casino fields at the same time.
It saves maybe 4 clicks and a page load. On its own it's nothing.
But that's the whole point. A lot of small things like that add up into something people actually enjoy using.
That's why three good versions went into trash, and why this one didn't.
Spinoko v3 is live now. More features at the theme page. This is the demo website. Prices changed alongside the launch, and there's a discount until September 30: product and pricing updates.
Written by Levon, Founder of DinoMatic
Hey, I'm Levon - a web developer who loves helping gambling and Forex affiliates build fast, SEO-friendly websites that convert. I've created WP themes like Spinoko, Akurai, and FXT, designed for lean setups that don't compromise on performance or rankings. I write from hands-on experience - I test, tweak, and share what works.