Introducing Twenty Nineteen

GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/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, Blogblog (versus network, site) Post Example
Twenty Nineteen Theme, Homepage Example

Full page mockups: Low-resHigh-res
InVision prototypes: Post Desktop, Post Mobile, Homepage Desktop, Homepage Mobile

At the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. 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.

Twenty Nineteen Theme, Gutenberg Editor Styles Mockup

Timeline

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 candidaterelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 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 GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ 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.

Some notes:

  • The theme is based on both _s and the gutenberg-starter-theme.
  • 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: