First Look at The Twenty Nineteen Default Theme

Allan Cole, a WordPress Theme Imagineer at Automattic has published the first glimpses of the Twenty Nineteen default theme slated to ship with WordPress 5.0. Cole is leading the theme while Kjell Regstad who does Product and Editorial Design at Automattic will be a design coach.

Twenty Nineteen Blog Post Layout

The theme takes a minimalist approach that’s a good fit for writers and can be adapted for simple business sites as well. Twenty Nineteen doesn’t have a sidebar but will have an area in the footer to display widgets.

The theme will have full compatibility with Gutenberg when it’s released. It will also contain Front-end and Back-end editor styles. This will allow the presentation of content in the back-end to closely resemble how the finished product will look like.

Twenty Nineteen is based on the Underscores and Gutenberg starter themes. SASS is used to keep styles in-sync between Gutenberg and the front-end experience which Cole notes is, “not usual for a default theme and open to debate.”

With WordPress 5.0 scheduled for a November release, Twenty Nineteen is on a fast track development cycle. A release candidate is expected to be available at the end of this month.

To keep tabs on development, you can monitor the project’s GitHub page. GitHub will be used to develop Twenty Nineteen until it’s ready to be merged into core. At that time, the GitHub page will be deprecated as development moves to WordPress Core Trac.

Dev meetings that last a half-hour will take place every Tuesday at 12PM EDT in the #core-themes Slack channel. It’s worth noting that if Twenty Nineteen is not ready in time for the planned November 19th, release of WordPress 5.0, it will be removed and released at a later date.