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Jeff Chandler

A Theme Called 2010

I’m sure you’ll be seeing plenty of sites with the following video embedded in their post as some exciting news was announced. In 2010, there will be a new default theme that will be shipped with WordPress called 2010. This is the only detail that is known about the new theme so far which leaves plenty of room for speculation, guessing, and just plain fun on trying to figure out more about this theme.

I have a couple of serious guesses to what the theme could be. I’m going to say that the default theme will work on the principles of the parent/child relationship. The default theme will be a theme framework that people will be able to build off of. As for release, the most obvious version is 3.0 but I can see it coming in 3.1 or at the end of the year. After all, the team has 365 days to play with and generally 3 major releases. Add your thoughts and guesses to the comments so they can be documented and when the new default theme is shipped or we find out what it will consist of, I’ll write another post to give kudos to whomever got it right.

Aside from that, it’s cool to see all of the core team members in the same room and put a face and voice to the name. In the time span of five years, this is the first time all 5 core committers were physically together in the same place.

I highly encourage you to watch the video, especially the Ryan Boren clip at the end which is pretty funny!

https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.11
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13 responses to “A Theme Called 2010”

  1. I’m interested to see what the come up with. Although I must say, if they introduce a new framework and start releasing canonical plugins… they are going to start stepping on the toes of the theme and plugin developers that make WordPress so great.

    Step on their toes, they quit releasing themes and plugins. If they quit releasing themes and plugins… WordPress just won’t be as cool regardless of how good a default theme framework or the canonical plugins are.

    Honestly I think Matt and Co. need to focus on the core and leave the rest to the community.

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  3. I’d like to see a new default theme which has an options screen that allows end-users to easily reformat the basic layout. Choose how many sidebars, sidebar placement, allow them to easily change color schemes, and/or upload a header image. A selection of different font-stacks to choose from might be cool, too.

    Kubrick was great when it first came out (particularly compared to Classic) — it was clean and well-structured. But so many people just never changed it, that it practically became a joke. Building in some variation would be one way to add some freshness.

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  4. I think that this “2010” theme could even be developed by a reputable theme developer, with the possibility to “enhance” the experience by buying child themes.

    Of course this theme would have some cool features included, such as changing parts of the layout / colors, twitter / social widgets, etc.

    All I hope is that it won’t try to jump over the premium theme developers’s heads :)

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  5. I hope the new default theme is white with square corners and has a template example for every file in the official hierarchy. I also hope a lot of thought goes into the names used for ids and classes. Set the standard so to speak.

    960px fixed width
    Horizontal navigation
    2 and 3 column examples (files not a theme option)
    Well structured style sheet
    Extensive commenting in code
    Great examples of popular template tags

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  6. My guess is it will ship with 3.0 with the merged codebase since the merged codebase will be philisophically a new beginning. To get an idea of what it might look like, visit http://testbp.org.

    By releasing Buddymatic I demonstrated that a theme could be BuddyPress capable without being BuddyPress dependent. I think it would be appropriate if the new default theme had that capability.

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  7. I think that the new default theme should be extremely well documented – even if some of it’s overkill, the loop or anything else.

    I definitely think that creating a master “parent” theme way is a good idea; it makes things easier for developers – but at the same time, it should learn from the mistakes of all the major theme frameworks out there – to quote Dion Hulse, some of them are just plain “doing it wrong”.

    I think the emphasis should be more on writing good code over making it do everything – because it just can’t do it. I think elastic is a smothering pile of crap, and that no one should touch it. Headway tried and failed at doing the same thing. There’s plugins to do everything such as twitter or what have you. Kickass typography wouldn’t be bad either – and something that looked stunning would rock. Matt Thomas probably has something up his sleeve for that.

    All-in-all, I’m sure the core team will do a great job of implementing it, though.

    I guess the real question – is is this going to spearhead the way for canoical themes?

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  8. I wouldn’t get too excited.

    If the theme isn’t developed in-house (like P2 and Monotone), then it will probably be farmed out to a relatively unknown person. A possible exception to this might be them taking something like Sandbox and bringing it into 2010. I doubt very seriously anyone who charges money for themes will be considered for the role.

    I also highly doubt that the theme will be loaded up with hooks or filters or any other framework-esque features. The default theme has always served as a sample theme. I wouldn’t expect to see that change.

    More than likely, it’ll be a bare-bones theme with excellent, minimal markup structure, well commented PHP and CSS, and liberal use of dynamic classes to accomplish the design. Kubrick’s major flaw has always been it’s outdated code.

    I’d also expect to see some CSS3 and maybe even HTML5. After all, the theme IS called 2010.

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  11. There are several purposes for a default theme… getting newbies online fast and intuitively, troubleshooting when your premium theme has a blowout, highlighting the WP technology for reliability and intelligent design, and of course continuing the open source collaboration. I would like to see the new default theme to include drag and drop layout the way widgets are now… and the way blogger has been for years. I’d also like to see a configuration panel where basic css changes can be made by newbies like default width, sidebar width, background color and image, wrapper colors, header image, footer image. That can be done in a bullet-proof way so newbies can bypass it and users on the learning curve can play with the ability to reset to default values when they get in trouble. Premium Themes have better support and more elaborate configuration options than WP can possibly provide, so they should not feel threatened by advances built into the WP default theme.

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  12. My guess is it will be a minimalistic, but pretty theme released in version 3.0.

    I can’t imagine a full blown framework like Thematic or Hybrid type being used as there’s just too much functionality built into those to be suitable as a default theme.

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