DEV3 Athenaeum – 3D Education, Courses & Bookshop WordPress Theme for Elementor & WooCommerce

DEV3 Athenaeum is a WordPress theme for schools, academies, evening colleges, course creators and independent bookshops. The home page is a scroll-driven 3D story rendered live in WebGL. A leather-bound book floats open under a green reading lamp inside a library of drifting volumes. As visitors scroll, its pages turn, then fan out like a flip-book. The volumes land in two neat stacks, and finally the book closes to show its gold-tooled cover.

There is no public live demo. Watch the video tour at the top of this page, or step through the screenshots at desktop, tablet and phone sizes.

The 3D scroll story

• The scene is procedural three.js: the book, the pages, the lamp and the library are made in code. There are no licensed photos or models to replace.
• The story is built from ordinary Elementor containers. Switch on Use as 3D chapter on a container and it becomes a camera stop.
• Each chapter can set scene state that blends as visitors scroll:
  • turn: how many pages have turned
  • fan, close and stack: whether the pages fan open, the book shuts, or the volumes land in two stacks
  • spread and swirl: the size and rotation of the drifting library
  • warm and lift: the lamp's warmth and how high the book floats
• Drifting volumes dissolve when they pass behind your text.
• Three presets:
  • Athenaeum: the reading room: the signature story. Set the cover leather, the title tooled on the cover, the lamp and the room colours.
  • Athenaeum: book viewer: hardcover, paperback or e-reader, shown cover-and-spine, fore-edge or lying open. Covers are typeset live with the theme fonts.
  • Athenaeum: study still life: armillary sphere, globe, inkwell and quill, hourglass, mortarboard, candle and books on a desk.
• Upload your own .glb model (Draco, KTX2 and meshopt supported) at any time.

Built for schools and bookshops

• Courses. Each course has a level, duration, lessons (shown as a numbered syllabus), instructor and fee. Subjects become filter buttons on the Courses page, and Course structured data is printed automatically.
• Instructors. Each profile has a role and biography, and lists the courses that instructor teaches.
• Events. Open days, lectures, workshops and book launches, each with start and end times, venue, programme, entry price and an optional WooCommerce ticket. Without a ticket, the event's button opens the admissions form with that event pre-selected.
• Admissions. A Contact Form 7 application form. A course's Enrol button arrives with that course already selected.
• LearnDash and Tutor LMS. The built-in Course type is a catalogue. To sell and deliver lessons online, install LearnDash or Tutor LMS. Athenaeum styles their course pages, lesson lists and progress bars, and points Enrol buttons at your LMS checkout.
• Bookshop. Books are WooCommerce variable products with a Format attribute (Hardcover, Paperback, eBook). The product page shows a 3D book with your title, author and cover colour, and picking a format switches between hardcover, paperback and e-reader live.
• Shop extras. AJAX mini-cart drawer, quick view and a reading list (wishlist). The classic and block Cart and Checkout are both styled.

Edit everything

• Every demo page is built with the free Elementor plugin. The DEV3 widget category adds 20 widgets, from 3D Scene and 3D Product Viewer to Post Type Grid (courses, events, instructors and posts, with subject filters), Countdown, FAQ (with FAQ schema), Contact / Map (OpenStreetMap, no API key) and Form.

• Course, event and instructor pages can also be built in Elementor. The course template keeps its hero, facts, syllabus and enrolment card around your content.

• Every widget has a block-editor twin. The theme also adds a 3D Chapter block, 27 block patterns (course cards, timetable rows, syllabus, book of the month, admissions steps and more) and block styles such as an illuminated drop cap.

• Customizer:

  • parchment, ink, accent and brass colours, and self-hosted EB Garamond and Manrope fonts
  • header style and Apply now button, 3D quality, loader, cursor, smooth scrolling, grain and chapter rail
  • footer, shop and blog settings
  • Courses & Admissions: the enrolment page, the Enrol button text and related courses

  Saving also updates Elementor's Global Colors and Fonts.

• Elementor Pro is supported (header, footer, single, archive and product Theme Builder locations) but not required.

• A child theme is included for your own CSS and PHP.

Performance and accessibility

• The 3D engine loads only on pages with a scene: about 206 KB gzip including three.js, plus an 18 KB lazy chunk for the Athenaeum scenes. Other pages load about 10 KB of JavaScript.
• Quality is chosen per device and steps down if the frame rate drops.
• Visitors with reduced motion, Save-Data or no WebGL see a still poster image instead of the live scene.
• The page text stays in the HTML for search engines and screen readers.
• Skip link, visible focus rings, keyboard menus and an ARIA-live cart count. Includes an RTL stylesheet, a .pot file and wpml-config.xml.

What's in the download

• dev3-athenaeum.zip: the theme (the demo package is built in)
• dev3-athenaeum-child.zip: the child theme
• dev3-theme-toolkit.zip: the DEV3 Theme Toolkit plugin (Elementor widgets and blocks, the Course, Instructor and Event post types, WooCommerce extras, demo importer)
• dev3-athenaeum-demo-content.zip: the demo package, for reference
• Documentation/: the HTML guide

The one-click demo imports:

• the Home (five-chapter 3D story), Courses, Instructors, Events, About, Admissions, Contact, Bookshop, Journal and account pages
• 9 courses in 5 subjects, 6 instructors and 5 events
• 9 bookshop products, 6 journal posts, 4 sample testimonials and 2 forms

Every school, person and title is fictional, and every image is generated by the theme's own scenes.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or newer (tested up to 6.8) and PHP 7.4 or newer
• Elementor (free) is recommended; Elementor Pro, LearnDash and Tutor LMS are optional
• WooCommerce for the bookshop, Contact Form 7 for the admissions and contact forms
• The DEV3 Theme Toolkit plugin (included; WordPress prompts you to install it)

Support

Six months of support are included: installation, demo import and questions about the theme's features. Read how we built Athenaeum for the design decisions behind the turning-page story.