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Gutenberg grants users an unprecedented level of freedom to customize their site’s layout and design. In order to fully achieve their vision, users will need a new generation of flexible themes, built to take advantage of the creative freedom that Gutenberg offers.
With that in mind, WordPress 5.0 will launch with a brand new default theme: Twenty Nineteen. The theme will be led by @allancole, supported by @kjellr as a design coach.
Twenty Nineteen Theme, Blog Post ExampleTwenty Nineteen Theme, Homepage Example
At the core of Twenty Nineteen is its simple, sophisticated typography. The theme’s aesthetic is minimal and non-prescriptive, allowing the theme to work well in a variety of applications. For example: it is effective as an minimal, typography-driven blogging theme, but can also be adapted for use as a static business website.
Twenty Nineteen will ship with full Gutenberg support. It will include both front and back-end styles, so that users can be fully confident in their site’s appearance when they hit publish.
As mentioned in the release plan, WordPress 5.0 will be released on November 19th, 2018, so this is a faster-than-usual theme build. The first release candidate is estimated for the end of October, so we’ll want to have a working version of the theme ready by then. Because of time limitations we may remove Twenty Nineteen from 5.0 if it is not ready in time for launch.
Get Involved
If you are interested in contributing, please be sure to follow this blog. During the design and development process, there will be weekly half-hour meetings every Tuesday at 16:00 UTC in #core-themes, beginning today, October 16, 2018.
Theme development will happen on GitHub and in the interest of time, an in-progress version of the theme code has been uploaded here: https://github.com/WordPress/twentynineteen. Once the theme is stable, it will be merged into core and the GitHub repo will be depreciated.
SASS is used in some key areas which has been helpful for keeping styles in-sync between the Gutenberg editor, and the front-end experience. This is not usual for a default theme and open to debate.
There is plenty of work left to do too and issues will be created in the coming days to help guide the process.
Learn more
If you’re interested in learning more about default themes, you can read the following posts:
