Meet WordPress 6.7 Release Squad & Default Theme

Last week, the lineup for the eighteen-member release squad and the default theme for WordPress 6.7 were revealed. This will be the third and final WordPress release of the year.

WordPress 6.7 Release Squad

As usual, Matt Mullenweg leads the release, with David Baumwald serving as the Release Coordinator. The Core Tech Leads are Peter Wilson (sponsored by 10up) and Kira Schroder (sponsored by GoDaddy). The squad also includes:

Editor Tech Leads: Robert Anderson, Kai Hao (Both from Automattic)

Core Triage Leads: Ahmed Kabir Chaion, (Zone7) Stoyan Georgiev (SiteGround)

Editor Triage Leads: Nick Diego (Automattic), Damon Cook (WP Engine)

Documentation Leads: Fabian Kägy (10up), Mumtahina Faguni (WPDeveloper)

Test Lead: Ankit K. Gupta (10up)

Design Lead: Joen Asmussen (Automattic)

Performance Lead: Mukesh Panchal (10up)

Default Theme Design Lead: Beatriz Fialho (Automattic)

Default Theme Development Leads: Carolina Nymark (Yoast), Juan Aldasoro

Automattic is sponsoring five squad members (excluding Matt), with 10up following closely behind with four members.

Automattic-sponsored Core contributor Héctor Prieto shared that the team is experimenting with combining the Marcomms and Release Coordination roles but may revert this change during the process, depending upon the feedback.

He continued: “While announcing the whole release squad is ideal, at the end of the day, it involves a lot of async coordination that delays the announcement. Feedback received indicates this is particularly constraining for the Default Theme Role, for which the leads had to start the work before this announcement to avoid getting caught by the release deadlines.”

To address this, he suggested two solutions: providing weekly updates on the release squad and making an early call for volunteers for the default theme separate from the release squad.

Introducing Twenty Twenty-Five

The default theme for WordPress 6.7 will be Twenty Twenty-Five. In the words of the Theme Design Lead Beatriz Fialho, “Twenty Twenty-Five embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing the many ways WordPress enables people to tell their stories with many patterns and styles to choose from. The glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry woven into the theme evoke ideas of impermanence, the passage of time, and continuous evolution.”

When WordPress turned 21 in May, Matt Mullenweg shared eleven points for building WordPress with the first point being, “Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.” The design team is building the default theme based on this principle.

Like its predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Four, Twenty Twenty-Five will also be fully compatible with the Site Editor and will utilize the new design tools, such as the Grid block and Pattern/Section Styles. The theme includes templates for personal blogs, photo blogs and complex blogs.

“The demo content imagery, all from the Public Domain, carries a poetic, universal, and ubiquitous tone that complements the core concept. There was an opportunity to visually lean into a positive tone to bring softness, lightness, and inspiration through its aesthetic.” Beatriz Fialho continued. She also shared the Figma designs for the theme.

Recognizing the theme’s global audience, the design team prioritized high-quality fonts that support multiple languages and included a set of diverse color palettes as style variations to offer more customization options. The theme also features a broad range of patterns.

Those interested can follow the theme’s development on the Twenty Twenty-Five GitHub repository or join the weekly Slack meetings in #core-themes.

The community’s responses included “It looks so beautiful,” “Absolutely beautiful work,” and “The next best default WordPress theme.” Some wondered why WordPress chooses a new default theme every year instead of improving the existing one. If you, too, are wondering the same, Knut Sparhell elaborated: “The latest default theme has always strived to use, and demonstrate the use of, the latest core features. Earlier themes can not just be updated with everything, as they should continue to work even with older core versions. This could be solved by upgrade requirements for the WP version, but then those left out would not get security and bug fixes, and some minor enhancements. One can look at the yearly new default block theme as an upgrade to the previous.”