Hey there and welcome back!
So with what was supposed to be the last major WordPress release of 2021, we’re getting a new default WordPress theme aptly named TwentyTwentyTwo. This default theme, as you’ll see during our demo, is the most flexible default theme ever. And it does a spectacular job of showing off what you can do with full site editing.
So today let’s take a look at the theme and everything that it offers you if you decide to use it.
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Now let’s get started.
What this theme is
So every year with the last major release of the year, the WordPress team creates a new default theme. TwentyTwentyTwo is that theme for the last update for 2021, however, when WordPress 5.9 got delayed, so did the new default theme.
But the wait has been worth it. TwentyTwentyTwo flawlessly shows off what full site editing can do for your website, from the global styles, including colors and typography, to the header and footer to all of the different templates. Plus it even has color palettes you can choose from to save time.
It’s also the most flexible WordPress default theme ever. Most default themes are just themes that you use on your website until you find or create the perfect theme for your site. But TwentyTwentyTwo might not be that for most websites. You could, in theory, create a unique website to you or your business just by customizing the heck out of it. It’ll take time, of course, especially to play around with the editor and what not, but it is possible.
Plus, it provides a great playground for those of us who are web designers or developers to really play around with full site editing and what it can do. I know for me, I’ve had a few mental roadblocks with full site editing and how to really use it to the best of its ability. But trying out WordPress 5.9 with the new TwentyTwentyTwo theme, it all becomes a lot clearer on how it’s supposed to work.
Finally, despite what you might think, at a base level it loads pretty quick. And a lot of that comes down to, well, the file size. In total it checks in at around 4 megabytes, most of which are photos and videos that are included with the theme which you can easily get rid of if you don’t need. And just for comparison, my Sports Bench Main Theme actually checks in at around 7 megabytes, so it’s quite a bit smaller.
Live demo
Okay so we’re just going to take a little bit of demo of the new TwentyTwentyTwo theme just so you can see what you can do with the theme.
So right now I’ve got sort of this basic test website I have for creating things with Easy Digital Downloads. Nothing too fancy right now. I’ve just installed and activated the TwentyTwentyTwo theme, and this is what the homepage looks like by default. It’s basically just a listing page for what I have on the site.
As you can see this is all pretty basically laid out. We can come in and view the single post template. And this is what it looks like. All very straightforward.
And then this is what the single page template looks like. Again very simple and very minimal. I actually kind of like that. And then this is basically what an archive page would look like.
And now really the best part about the TwentyTwentyTwo theme and WordPress full site editing is that we can easily change all of these templates right from the editor and you don’t have to worry about any code.
So to do that we can go right up here to edit the site. And if you’re trying to access it from the dashboard, you go to Appearance and then Editor. And so we get loaded up in here. And one of the first things that we can do is click the styles tab to go open up the global styles editor. And we can change the typography and the font you want to use, the size of the text, the line height, and then even the font weight.
Also we can come in here and we can mess around with the colors. We can add in different color palettes that we’ll want to use throughout different blocks or sections of the website. Themes, especially the TwentyTwentyTwo theme, will have their own palettes that we can use. There are the default colors. And then you can come in here and create your own custom colors that you might want to use for your site.
And then you can apply these colors to the background. I wouldn’t recommend that, but you can really just mess around with it pretty easily, as well as text and link colors as well.
Now what really makes this very flexible with full site editing and how the TwentyTwentyTwo theme utilizes that is that we can change things like the header, the footer, what the homepage template looks like, what the page template looks like, what the single post template looks like.
So just as sort of a brief walkthrough of that, we can come in here and we’re just going to edit the header a little bit. And then we can add in items to our menu. And then with the menu you can change the orientation, justify it, whatever, all of this fun business. It’s been really well done from the first time I really started to use it with WordPress 5.8. So that’s simple.
We can also add in your site logo or any of that. A nice rounded logo.
And then really similar with the footer. We can come down here and we can even mess with this. And then we would come in here and hit save. And then we can come down here to the bottom, and our changes have been saved, and you’ll see it on basically every page. So like I can come down here.
And it just doesn’t work for the footer or the header. You can also do it for the homepage, if you wanted to change. Right now it’s querying the last 10 posts, but you could change it if you wanted something more static, you could change the page to show text and different blocks and use some of the different block patterns that are included.
Or we can go in here and we can browse more of the templates. So let’s look at the single page. You can come in here and a lot of the sort of default blocks are here — placeholder blocks or whatever you want to call them — like the post title. And this is where the page title is shown or the featured image. So obviously you don’t see a whole lot of content here. Or the post content is where the main body content will show up.
You can arrange this in different ways. So for example here with the — maybe if you have great featured images for your pages, you want to make it full align and go across the the entire width of the page. Or maybe you pages aren’t going to have featured images, which is fine, you can just come in here and delete that block. And then you can hit save and it saves it.
And then we can even come in here over to the single post template. Maybe for this we’re going to have a lot of featured images with our posts then we would put it full align. And then we don’t want to deal with post terms really. And don’t want to deal with post categories and don’t want to deal with post tags. And then we can do that.
We can also add in comments. You could hypothetically, if you have a block from something like Yoast or some other plugin that maybe has related posts, you would be able to add it here and those would automatically get inserted into every single post no matter what you do with that post. Anyway, we come in here and hit save.
And really that’s all there is to this theme. You can really play around with it. I’ve had a lot of fun just messing around, not doing a whole lot specifically just seeing what’s available to mess around with and how full site editing works. Because I’ve been trying to figure out how to work with full site editing themes in create custom premium themes that way so that users can build whatever they want while having sort of a design and structure that a normal things has.
And this is a great example for how all of that can work. So I would definitely take some time, see if you can set it up in a sandbox or test environment where you can mess around with things, break things — that’s always fun to do when you’re first learning it out and something — so you can break things, where are the limits and all of that in a completely safe environment and just really have fun.
Because by far this is my favorite default WordPress theme.
Final thoughts
So hands down this is the best WordPress default theme out there. There are so many different things that you can do with this theme, and the possibilities are endless. If you have enough time, you could basically just create any type of website you want with this theme, and that’s pretty impressive.
I highly recommend that you try and find some sort of sandbox where you can try out this theme and WordPress 5.9 on your own. That way you can break it and screw things up and make mistakes, but not break any of your live sites.
In the end, it’s going to be the perfect showcase for what you can do with full site editing and WordPress in today’s world. Awesome job to everyone who worked on this theme.
Outro
So that’s it for today. What questions do you have about the TwentyTwentyTwo theme? Is it something you might want to use for your website now? Be sure to leave them down in the comments section below.
If you want to see more videos on WordPress, web design, ecommerce, digital marketing and other website related topics, be sure to hit the subscribe button and to ring the bell for notifications.
But until next time, I wish you and your business the best of luck.
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