The new Twenty Thirteen theme is now in WordPress Core, as Mark Jaquith has just announced over on Make WordPress Core.
It’s a pretty big departure from what we usually expect out of a default bundled theme in terms of colour, but my first impression is very positive.
There’s a demo site available for those who want to take a quick tour. You can also install it yourself if you’re into installing WordPress trunk from SVN.
I took it for a test run with the Theme Unit Test data to see how it handled post formats, which is one of the main focuses for the new theme (and also the upcoming WordPress 3.6 release too).
As you can see, for a first draft, it holds up very well to the various post and format tests thrown at it.
The colours look good, and the little inline font icon symbols are a nice touch that really lets the theme shine at any resolution.
Some things you can’t see in this screenshot, are the floating navigation bar which becomes visible on scrolling, the 404 page, and the asymmetrical pagination arrows.
All of which you can see in the demo linked above. If you’re a fan of the jQuery Masonry plugin you’ll be pleased to know, now that it’s included in core, it’s been used to handle the layout of widgets in the footer of Twenty Thirteen.
Under Matt Mullenweg’s direction, Joen Asmussen, Konstantin Obenland, and Lance Willett have done an amazing job, and I’m sure will continue to participate in polishing the new theme off ready for release.
Lance has also posted on Make WordPress Themes with a call for testing and performance enhancement, including links to the relevant Trac tickets.
So, if you’re inclined to pitch in, head over there and contribute to making sure Twenty Thirteen is ready for the planned release of WordPress 3.6 in April.
Historically, bundled themes have been fairly laid back and readily leant themselves to being a starter or parent theme. They were fairly inoffensive and generic.
Not so much with Twenty Thirteen! As you can clearly see already, this theme isn’t backwards about coming forwards.
It’s colourful, it has a preference for a single column blog-style site, and it’s certainly not going to work for every kind of site (or even blog). I tip my hat to the bold, warm, experimental nature of Twenty Thirteen.
In particular, it makes me excited for future bundled themes too. Now this new precedent is set, who knows what might come next!
What’s your favourite little detail discovered in this draft of the new theme?
Do you love or hate its boldness? Will you use it as-is on any of your sites, or even at all?
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