Forget about Twenty Eighteen. The year is almost over and we are about to see the release of the controversial project from WordPress, Gutenberg. We will also discover Twenty Nineteen theme is to be the new default theme.
I just read the latest article from the WP Tavern website called “First Look at the Twenty Nineteen default theme“. Interesting concept because it’s similar to one I was building, so I will probably make some changes.
One issue that was noticed and commented by a few others, is the lack of a sidebar for the left or right of a page. An odd omission, but my guess is that the designer wanted to keep the twenty nineteen theme simple and minimal. The article did mention that is was a minimalist style.
Twenty Nineteen theme for WordPress 5
Matt’s plan for releasing WordPress 5.0 offers a tentative estimate for a release candidate to ship in November of this year. This means we are just weeks away from Gutenberg being official. The idea from my understanding is that the new Twenty Nineteen theme is to be part of WordPress 5.
Right after I finish writing this article, I plan to get my hands dirty with the new default theme and to see this thing close up. Based on the screenshot, I would say this is a theme built as a starter theme for new websites with a focus on personal blogs.
Gutenberg
As for the Gutenberg editor, the plugin has over 500,000 active installs at the time of writing this. With the number of websites using WordPress up into the millions, that is a small number. The reviews and rating for Gutenberg have not been favorable as the screenshot shows:
If you search Google about Gutenberg and Gutenberg controversy, you will discover a lot of articles. However, there are also many who praise this new editor from Automattic as being a fresh direction.
I’m one that has never been a fan of Gutenberg, but I will be honest in saying it has its uses for certain sites. I even made the bold move and built the Rough Pixels website to use it. In fact, all the content on this website was created with Gutenberg.
This is a new website, and even our first theme called Salal is created for Gutenberg; as will all future themes.
No Twenty Eighteen?
I was looking forward to a Twenty Eighteen theme, but as mentioned, we are approaching the year 2019. So it only makes sense to move up to the TwentyNineteen theme.
Based on what we see so far, it looks interesting and I’m looking forward to trying it out.