New WordPress Default Theme Twenty Seventeen Merged into 4.7

WordPress 4.7 will ship with a new default theme in December. David Kennedy merged Twenty Seventeen into core yesterday as his first commit to WordPress. Any remaining development issues for the project will now be managed via Trac.

In the merge proposal, Kennedy described Twenty Seventeen as “an ambitious theme that focuses on a creative home page and an easy site setup experience for users.” It is the first default theme designed specifically for business websites. The theme includes four customizable panels on the front page (as seen in Kennedy’s demo video below), which can be set to display content from existing pages. It includes support for uploading a custom logo and uses SVG icons throughout the theme, which Kennedy notes is a first for a default theme.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/files/2016/10/panels-ui-small.mp4

Twenty Seventeen will offer three different options for a color scheme: light, dark, or custom (which can be set via a user-friendly color-picker):

https://make.wordpress.org/core/files/2016/10/colors.mp4

“Twenty Seventeen will ship with its current implementation of panels in the theme and without video headers,” Kennedy said during yesterday’s core development meeting. A ticket for adding core support for video headers is open on Trac and contributors are still working out all of the intricacies of the feature. It may not be ready to ship with the first version of Twenty Seventeen, but it’s an exciting step forward for standardizing an approach for developers who want to build video headers into their themes.

“Video headers are definitely doable,” Nick Halsey said during yesterday’s meeting. “It’s a matter of getting consensus on the best approach on the ticket.”

Contributors have also discussed creating a multi-panel page that lets users select content for the different sections. It would benefit Twenty Seventeen but contributors are considering giving it more time in development as a feature plugin.

“Regarding multi-panel, I’d agree that it’s not going to make it,” Kennedy said in the #core Slack channel today. “That isn’t to diminish the awesome work done so far, but it needs more. I’d like to start making plans for it to be a feature plugin, perhaps. I want to see the momentum continue. Core needs a solution around this, and it will take more people to help make it even better.”

Twenty Seventeen has had 59 contributors to date and may gain a few more before the 4.7 release cycle is finished. The theme will benefit from testing in as many different environments as possible, since it will immediately be high profile as the next default WordPress theme.