This year’s WordPress release schedule puts the next major release around the end of the year. In that release will come the new default theme – TwentySixteen. The development version is up on GitHub for you to test and contribute if your inclined.
On this site I’ve been a default theme user. When I started I used TwentyFifteen and wrote a couple of thoughts. Now that the development version of next years default is available I couldn’t resist giving it a try.
There’s a few ways that you could get this installed on your site. The easiest may be to download the zip from Github and upload it to your site. Alternatively you could clone it to your site with git clone or use WP-CLI to install and activate it for you.
Cloning The Theme into Your Site
Navigate to the themes directory on your site – /wp-content/themes/ – and run the clone command:
git clone https://github.com/WordPress/twentysixteen.git
Updating the theme as it develops is easy by running git pull from the theme directory.
Installing a theme From Github via WP-CLI
From anywhere in the WordPress installation you can run the theme install command, pass it a theme-slug or a url to a zip file and it’ll install it in the correct location.
wp theme install https://github.com/WordPress/twentysixteen/archive/master.zip
add --activate at the end of the command to activate it right away and --force if you want to suppress any warnings about overwrites.
Note: If you install the theme like this it’ll be located in the twentysixteen-master folder instaed of the twentysixteen folder.
Contributing to the Next Default Theme
You can contribute to the theme and shape its development moving forward by creating issues and pull requests in the GitHub repo.
You will need to know a little bit about using git to contribute but it’s nothing really complicated. You should be able to find out everything you need to know by taking a look at my WordPress and Git Workflow post.
If you’re interested in contributing you should also check out the CONTIBUTING.md file in the repo.
1 reply on “A Default Kinda Guy – Installing TwentySixteen”
After falling in love with Twenty Fifteen last year (the first time I really fell in love with a default theme), I thought it would be on my site for years because nothing would be able to stand up next to it. But now, after seein Twenty Sixteen here, I’m already starting to think that Twenty Fifteen may not last long after all! It looks great and these writing-focused, minimalistic themes look amazing (thanks greatly to Takashi Irie and Ian Stewart)