Introducing Twenty Twenty

The BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Editor will soon celebrate its first birthday in CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and with every update it grows more capable. The promise of the block editor is to give users the freedom to design and structure their sites as they see fit. The responsibility of a theme is to empower users to create their inspired vision by making the end result look as good, and work as well, as the user intended.

With that in mind, WordPress 5.3 will include a new default theme: Twenty Twenty. The Twenty Twenty team is @anlino as design lead, @ianbelanger taking charge of development, and @poena representing the Theme Review team.

The sub page view in Twenty Twenty.

A sub page in Twenty Twenty.


Twenty Twenty is designed with flexibility at its core. If you want to use it for an organization or a business, you can combine columns, groups, and media with wide and full alignments to create dynamic layouts to show off your services or products. If you want to use it for a traditional blogblog (versus network, site), the centered content column makes it perfect for that as well. 

As befits a theme called Twenty Twenty, clarity and readability is also a big focus. To that end, the theme will include the typeface Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson. The tall x-height of Inter makes it highly legible in the smallest of font sizes, and provides a strong personality when used in big headings. 

Inter comes in a Variable Font version, a first for default themes, which contains all weights and styles of Inter in just two font files. In modern browsers, this will help keep the number of requests and the page size down. Older browsers will fall back to loading each weight as a separate file. Running text will be set in a stack of serif system fonts to keep load times short and data caps distant.

The single post view in Twenty Twenty.

A blog post in Twenty Twenty.


Twenty Twenty will include full support for the Block Editor, as well as editor styles that make sure the editing experience matches the end result. In order to speed up development, Twenty Twenty will be based on the WordPress theme Chaplin, which was released on the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ theme directory earlier this summer.

You can find full page mockups of Twenty Twenty here:

Timeline

As mentioned in the release plan, WordPress 5.3 is targeted for release on November 12th, 2019. 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 targeted for October 15th.

Get Involved

If you are interested in contributing to Twenty Twenty, make sure you are following this blog. During the design and development process, there will be weekly meetings starting Monday at 19:00 UTC in #core-themes.

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/twentytwenty. Once the theme is stable, it will be merged into core and the GitHub repo will be deprecated.

Learn more

If you’re interested in learning more about default themes, you can read the following posts: