It’s that time again: time to build a new default theme for WordPress!

WordPress 4.7 will launch with a brand new theme – Twenty Seventeen. Designed by Mel Choyce (@melchoyce), Twenty Seventeen sports a modern look and will make a good base for any business website or product showcase.

Check out the gallery below to preview our next default theme at full-size:

(Higher resolution mockups)

In addition to having a wide appeal, Twenty Seventeen will focus on providing a seamless initial theme setup so anyone can set up a website for themselves or their business with minimal hassle.

Twenty Seventeen aims to show off some new coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. features and enhancements, such as:

A better flow for using a static page as your front page.

Visible edit icons in the Customizer Customizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. , replacing the current hidden shift+click method.

, replacing the current hidden shift+click method. Expanding custom header Header The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. images to include video (think: atmospheric video headers!).

images to include video (think: atmospheric video headers!). Dummy content for live previews.

Mel will keep an eye on all things design during the creation of Twenty Seventeen. Laurel Fulford (@laurelfulford) and David Kennedy (@davidakennedy) will assist her, leading the theme’s development. Lots of opportunities exist this year for getting involved with Twenty Seventeen – we need your help, and lots of it! 🙏🏽

Backing up the Twenty Seventeen team will be a team focusing on the core Themes APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. This team is looking for new and experienced core developers with theme experience to help lead and contribute to specific features.

Similar to feature projects, the initial development of the theme will be on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/. Once it’s usable and stable, the theme will be merged into core and the GitHub repo will be deprecated. After it’s merged, all issues should be reported to TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress..

Twenty Seventeen will also use plain CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. — it won’t use preprocessors in the development of the theme. This will keep it simple, making the theme easier for everyone to understand, quicker for anyone to modify and better to maintain in the long run.

Throughout the process of building Twenty Seventeen, the team will be collaborating with the Theme Review Team and the core development team to make sure it is up to core standards.

How can you get involved?

There will be weekly meetings every Friday at 18:00 UTC in #core-themes starting today. During that time, the focus will be on the theme itself. If you are interested in contributing, keep an eye out here for updates or join us in #core-themes in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

If you have some early thoughts on what would make this a great WordPress experience, or if you’re generally interested in participating, sound off in the comments. Please hold any design feedback for Friday’s meeting. where we can have a conversation about it in greater depth.

Want to know more about default themes?

Here are some links where you can find out more about past default themes: