The next default WordPress theme Twenty Twenty-Two has officially been announced by Kjell Reigstad, Design Director at Automattic, WordPress’ parent company. The theme is set to launch with WordPress 5.9 and will focus on full site editing, customizability, and ensuring it stays lightweight for fast page speeds.
The Twenty Twenty-Two theme has been inspired by the birds that come by Kjell Reigstad’s bird feeder every morning.
The birds are always up to something interesting: Sometimes they’re lining up patiently to take turns eating, other times they’re playfully performing aerial gymnastics.
That routine is the inspiration for this years’ default theme. Like the birds, Twenty Twenty-Two is designed to be light and resilient, with a hint of playfulness. The theme uses the lightweight Source Serif Pro for headlines, paired with a sensible sans-serif for support. Its color palette is drawn from nature, and layout elements sit gently on the page.
Customizability
The upcoming theme will take advantage of the wide range of page templates, headers, footers, and other patterns to truly customize it to specific needs and designs. Twenty Twenty-Two will also be launched with a range of ready-to-go color schemes that will ensure a unique look that’s unified throughout the website.
Twenty Twenty-Two is designed with the acknowledgement that its default appearance is not most people’s endpoint. Everyone deserves a truly unique website, built on a solid, well-designed foundation, and Twenty Twenty-Two aims to help them achieve that.
Lightweight and fast
Twenty Twenty-Two will be built with Full Site Editing in mind, WordPress’ latest feature it is focusing on. Full Site Editing with a compatible theme will allow for headers, footers, posts, archive pages, and every aspect of the theme to be customized.
To keep the theme lightweight and fast for visitors, the development team hopes to have all the styles configured in the theme.json file and editable through global styles. The team will also work closely with the Gutenburg team to build design tools in the block editor, unifying all theme editing into one place.
As a block theme, Twenty Twenty-Two will likely require WordPress 5.9 to run. If the Twenty Twenty-Two and 5.9 release leads determine that there is need in the community for broader theme support, we will explore ways to bridge that gap.
Development and availability
Twenty Twenty-Two theme development has kicked off just yet with the first weekly meeting to be held on Monday 11th of October to coordinate the development of the theme. Kjell Reigstad (@kjellr) is leading design for Twenty Twenty-Two, and Jeff Ong (@jffng) is leading development.
If you are interested in contributing or watching the theme coming along, you can do so via GitHub. Once the theme is stable it will be merged into the WordPress Core and the GitHub depreciated. At this time, you should be able to install the theme via the themes page on your WordPress site.
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Source: WordPress
