Twenty Thirteen Ins and Outs of Developing a Default Theme

KonstantinObenland

Theme Wrangler at Automattic

@obenland

profiles.wordpress.org/obenland

twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com

Default Themes In General

Goals With Yearly Themes- Create something different

from the year before

- Show off the latest and greatest features

- Support child themes and encourage customization

- Have an aesthetically pleasing design

- Work for a blog or a website

- Represent best coding practices, technical excellence

General Process

Matt sets design vision and feature directionMatt sets design vision and feature direction

Designer creates mockupsMatt selects an existing theme

Wrangler converts mockups into a working theme

Matt selects an existing theme

Community tests and polishes the dra"Community tests and polishes the dra"

Twenty Thirteen

Team for Twenty Thirteen

MattProject Owner

JoenTheme Designer

KonstantinTheme Developer

LanceProject Lead

January February March April

Timeline

158 27 29

Kick OffJanuary 2

2

First design mockupsJanuary 17

17

Final designJanuary 31

31

Working ThemeFebruary 8

Core commitFebruary 15

Code freezeMarch 27

ReleaseApril 29

Design Vision

- Back to the blog

- Beautiful implementation of post formats

- Visually very unique, maybe even a little quirky

Homework

- HTML5 comment markup

- HTML5 input types for comment form and search form

- Provide context for translation in search form and comments heading

- Twenty Thirteen to be designed with accessibility as a priority

Opinionated Design- Full of fun design details to create a

warm and welcoming vibe.

- Ships with three header images that work well with the bold color scheme.

- One-column layout is the default — theme works best with no sidebar.

- Optional display fonts for beautiful typography.

- A flexible, wide layout that looks great on large screens yet remains device-agnostic.

- Bundled icon font that makes zooming, printing, and recoloring much easier and more accessible.

Release

- Together with 3.6 release

- Pre-release on WordPress.com

- No pre-release to the WordPress.org Themes Directory

What’s next?

twentyfourteendemo.wordpress.com

Thank you!Questions?