The Twenty Twelve WordPress Theme: A First Look

WordPress changeset #19842 in the trunk welcomed the initial commit of the new Twenty Twelve WordPress theme by Drew Strojny. 28 files of something completely different. The commit message describes Twenty Twelve’s:

…much more minimalist approach that affords easy use as a CMS in addition to being blog-forward

twentytwelve 0.5

The Twenty Twelve theme has currently got:

  • an optional header image (set in header.php for now)
  • one primary menu
  • automatic feed links
  • one main sidebar
  • not a single line of JavaScript (no .js included)
  • relatively good looks when resizing and viewing on a mobile device

Twenty Twelve looks very young, with just around 2000 lines of code (compare: Twenty Eleven – around 6500 lines of code, Twenty Ten – 4000 lines of code [simple wc -l *]). An update on wpdevel suggests to consider this the 0.5 version, and, obviously, is not a ready theme (so don’t use it in production).

The readme is empty, but the style.css file hints at the following:

white, light, two-columns, right-sidebar, responsive-width, custom-background, custom-menu, microformats, post-formats, rtl-language-support, translation-ready

Biggest question is: when will Twenty Twelve be out? A freeze is promised by the 29th of February, but don’t rush to try it out in production, even then.

Meanwhile, if you’re feeling curious and courageous:
svn co https://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve

I’m personally liking how it’s turning out. What do you think? Have you tried it on already?