Twenty Eleven, the new WordPress default theme, has been officially unveiled. If you notice the similarities between Twenty Eleven and Duster, that’s because Duster was more or less the beta release of Twenty Eleven, but don’t be fooled by the similar looks. Twenty Eleven contains several under-the-hood enhancements and additional features, and it will be included by default with all WordPress downloads as soon as WordPress 3.2 is released!
WordPress.com users are welcome to try Twenty Eleven on their blogs now, and self-hosted WordPress users eager to try Twenty Eleven are more than welcome to get involved in WordPress 3.2 beta testing. Of course, if beta testing isn’t your thing, you can always try out the theme’s demo.
What do you think of the new default WordPress theme?
it looks kinda… like they didn’t really try and make it look decent. iuno, could just be me 😛 i’m picky.
Enormous headers feel dated, so design-wise I’m not sure it says “2011.” But I like most other things about it.
I’m not really all that sure whether they intended TwentyEleven to be a regularly used theme, or is it more of a theme upon which you can build upon?
Is TwentyEleven more of a teaching theme for people how to create certain aspects of a theme, such as post formats and the like?
It’s as if WP core dev really like header image.
Kubrick – has its infamous header forcing users to have it that way.
2010 – same principle, but even went further, it forces user to use header image – as if one post should have one feature image.
2011 – same principle, even bigger header image.
YES:
users can always use plugin or code it right in the function file to get rid of this feature, but the point of the ‘default’ is a plain simple platform to add things on, why make it the otherwise ?
NO:
I’m not saying that Kubrick/2010/2011 are bad design, in fact, they are beautiful and unique, but they are not meant to be a default theme.
PLEASE:
Give us a real default theme.
I still think that this theme, also named Twenty Eleven, should have been used
http://themes.dynamicwp.net/?t.....entyeleven
I don’t dislike it, but I think it wastes a lot of space. I understand the design principles about letting text “breathe” with lots of whitespace around, but I think that Twenty Eleven overdoes it. The header image is huge and a bit dated (I agree with the other commenters here) and it’s a pity it’s a different size than Twenty Ten, so you’ll need to personalise it again with the new dimensions.
But overall all I see is whitespace, whitespace, whitespace… I guess this will look good on 2000×1500 resolutions and above, but for us still stuck with 1440×980 or so, it’s a pain to be constantly scrolling down.
Besides that, it looks good enough 🙂
The new default looks really easy to customize. I like that wordpress makes it so that one can really focus on the content with simple templates.