Introducing Twenty Twenty-Five

The WordPress 6.7 release will feature a new default theme: Twenty Twenty-Five.

Concept

While ideating Twenty Twenty-Five, one recurring idea was that simple things should be intuitive while complex things should be possible. This concept of simplicity and complexity leads to a reliable foundation for extending a default WordPress experience to make it yours.

Twenty Twenty-Five embodies ultimate flexibility and adaptability, showcasing the many ways WordPress enables people to tell their stories with many patterns and styles to choose from. The glimpses of natural beauty and ancestry woven into the theme evoke ideas of impermanence, the passage of time, and continuous evolution.

The demo content imagery, all from the Public Domain, carries a poetic, universal, and ubiquitous tone that complements the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. concept. There was an opportunity to visually lean into a positive tone to bring softness, lightness, and inspiration through its aesthetic.

Patterns

Structurally, Twenty Twenty-Five offers a robust set of patterns, promoting interoperability and enabling users to compose intentional pages quickly. A broad range of patterns was designed for categories such as services, about, landing pages, products, calls to actions, events, and others.

Styles

Given the theme’s global use, high-quality and comprehensive fonts that support multiple languages have been considered from the first conceptual steps of the design. Furthermore, we’re refining a set of diverse color palettes to be bundled within the theme as style variations.

Templates

Twenty Twenty-Five also features a versatile set of blogblog (versus network, site) templates: text-centric blogs with sidebars, photo blogs that highlight featured images, and more complex blogs with diverse content. Twenty Twenty-Five will be fully compatible with the Site Editor and will use many of the new design tools like the Grid 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. and Pattern/Section Styles.

Personal Blog (Default)

In keeping with the idea of simplicity, the personal blog tendency is to lean on a default template that just works, whether you want to write a post with a title and featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. or not, and showing all the post’s content out-of-the-box, instead of just excerpts.

Photo Blog (Alternative)

The alternative “photo blog” templates tailored primarily for photography or portfolios lean on an image-heavy approach, with interesting layouts that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Complex Blog (Alternative)

Lastly, the set of complex blog alternative templates would be more suitable for websites with greater complexity in content. Some of these templates, with more variety in type scales and more opinionated designs can also appeal to different audiences.

Development

As part of the 6.7 release, Carolina Nymark (@poena) and Juanfra Aldasoro (@juanfra) are leading development while Beatriz Fialho (@beafialho) is leading design. If you’re interested in contributing, make sure you’re following this blog; we look forward to your involvement and support throughout the process. 

The Figma file is the design source of truth. Comments in the main file are open, and anyone should feel free to duplicate the Figma to their drafts and remix. Both of these actions are free, whereas every edit access is paid and therefore reserved.

Theme development will happen on the Twenty Twenty-Five GitHub repository. You can contribute by submitting and reviewing pull requests or opening new issues and, as usual, once the theme is stable, it will be merged into Core and the 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/ repository will be archived.

Starting on Wednesday August 21st at 3:00 PM UTC , there will be weekly Slack meetings in #core-themes to coordinate development of the theme. Agenda notes will be posted before meetings and summaries posted after the meeting.

Learn more

For information about previous default themes, read the following posts:

• Twenty Twenty-Four
• Twenty Twenty-Three
• Twenty Twenty-Two
• Twenty Twenty-One
• Twenty Twenty

Here are a few resources if you’re interested in learning more about Block Themes and the Site Editor:

• Block Theme documentation
• Global Styles & theme.json documentation
• Full Site Editing Outreach Program
• A Developers Guide to Block Themes
• Develop Your First Low-Code Block Theme

+make.wordpress.org/themes/

Props @richtabor, @karmatosed, @priethor, @poena, @cbringmann and @joen for helping co-create this post and to @luminuu for proofreading it.

#6-7, #bundled-theme, #twenty-twenty-five