The next WordPress default theme?

Ian Stewart sug­gests on ThemeShaper that there should be a new default theme for WordPress to replace the stal­wart Kubrick, which has been the default for the past three years. It’s a great idea; Kubrick is look­ing a lit­tle long in the tooth. It’s time to rethink what should be included in the out-of-the-box WordPress theme.

Personally, I agree with Ian that Sandbox would make an excel­lent foun­da­tion for any default theme (all of the WordPress themes I’ve cre­ated for ThemeMeme have been built on Sandbox). Sandbox offers seman­tic markup and dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated classes, mak­ing it pow­er­ful, flex­i­ble, and easy to use. It was slated to be moved into the WordPress core in WordPress 2.5, but that inte­gra­tion has been delayed until 2.6.

One of the major advan­tages of includ­ing Sandbox is that sim­ple themes can be styled purely with CSS. WordPress could include a hand­ful of CSS stylesheets to give uses quick access to sev­eral alter­na­tive lay­outs gen­er­ated from a sin­gle instal­la­tion of tem­plate files. I’ve often posed the ques­tion: Why do blogs have to look like blogs? With Sandbox, a vari­ety of style sheets could be included for dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions or design pref­er­ences, such as a magazine-style lay­out, a port­fo­lio style, min­i­mal­ist, Web 2.0, etc. The default theme shouldn’t have one look, but reflect WordPress’s power and flexibility.

Check out Ian’s post and add your ideas to the com­ments. ThemeShaper, in part­ner­ship with iThemes, is giv­ing away pre­mium themes to those com­menters who come up with the best ideas.

Via ThemeShaper