WordPress Twenty Twenty Theme Review

Hello and welcome to WordPress Wednesday!

So WordPress 5.3 is right around the corner. As is typical, this is the last major release of the year for WordPress, so there’s going to be a new default theme included with this release. And keeping with the naming convention, it will be Twenty Twenty.

Now, I do want to mention that the default themes for WordPress don’t have a lot of features, and instead they focus on styling and maybe what you can do with some of the new features included in the release.

And Twenty Twenty really isn’t any different. There are a couple of cool features, but you won’t obviously see a bunch of the features that you might see in other themes. And that’s okay because this is usually intended for beginners, and the focus is more on the styling and the look.

And overall, I really enjoy the look and feel of the Twenty Twenty theme. So today, ahead of the release, let’s take a look at Twenty Twenty.

Theme Overview

Okay, so when you come into the Twenty Twenty theme, it won’t be quite set up like this. I’ve gone ahead and kind of changed a few things. Kind of tried to recreate my own homepage here. A little bit difficult, but I was doing crazy things.

But overall, I got a really nice feel for things. It’s just a really cool sort of starter theme that you can really just play around with.

And it’s got a couple of really interesting features, so let’s go through a few of them.

Cover Template

So one of the coolest features that I’ve found with Twenty Twenty so far cover header block, or whatever you want to call it. You can do it for posts or pages. And it’s really pretty simple to set up.

I’ve got it here on the home page. I’ll go through how to do that on this page. As you can see, I don’t have it here.

Okay, so I’m going to go in and select a featured image. This is nice. And that’s an A380 coming in. And I’m going to go down here to page attributes. And I’m going to select “Cover Template”.

Hit update. And now we go in and view the page and there you go. There is your cover template. You can set the color you want here over in the Customizer which we’ll go over here shortly.

But other than that, it’s really nice — that nice sort of parallax effect. I’m a huge fan. I wouldn’t use it for every page. But your biggest pages, your biggest posts, definitely consider using it.

Gutenberg Blocks

Next, Twenty Twenty comes with some styling for the blocks. Especially sort of an updated one and some really cool styling with the block quote. This is all pretty basic. Pretty normal. Again, basic styling. It’s got styling really for this separator block.

A pretty basic table block styling. Where you really start to notice it is here with the latest posts grid view. This is something that’s going to be new with the Gutenberg updates that will be coming in 5.3. It’s got some fairly basic styling, but that’s something that other theme developers can certainly look at for their own inspiration.

These are your basic sort of block quotes. You can see different, alternate styles. And then we’re going to come in here and let’s go into this alternate block quote. And we’re going to transform it into a pull quote that is full align.

So this is really cool; the pullquote styling. It’s full width, or it can be full width or wide align or any of that. We’ve got the quote thing up here so we can obviously tell that it’s a pull quote. And let’s just go in and view the page.

And there’s still kind of a bug here. This should be white; it’s black. This is still in the testing phase as I’m recording this, so some things are still getting worked out.

But overall — there are aligned buttons, you can change these and all that — but overall it’s fairly basic styling but with basic things, people can build really cool things. So overall, a plus one for the blocks on this one.

Customizer

Finally, there are a few things you can do in the Customizer with this theme, specific to the Twenty Twenty theme.

The first is the colors. We can change the background color of, sort of, the main section. I do not recommend using this yellow color, but I’m just using it to show off what you can do. And then you have a header and footer color you can change too. A nice, nasty, clashing green you have here.

And then you also have this accent hue color that controls link colors, button colors, all of those types of things. Just play around with it to find something you like. Let’s go right there. And this is something that’s really cool. I never realized this was in the customizer — this color slider — which I might have to try out sometime.

And then you have a couple of theme options. You can show the search bar in the header if you want. And you can decide if you want to show full text or summary on the archive pages.

And then lastly you come across the cover template styles we can do. Here we can decide if we want that background image — this background image — to scroll with us or just stay fixed. And then we can also change the overlay color. Woah. There we go.

As you can tell, it takes a little getting used to, but we can play around with that and then we can play around with the color here.

And then finally we can choose the overlay opacity. So we can either have that as high as it goes or basically no overlay.

But really, those are things you can do in the customizer to change the theme. It is basic, admittedly, but if you play around with it long enough or if you know what you’re doing, it really can become something powerful. And you can really change it into something you like and something you can share with the world.

So, that’s Twenty Twenty in a nutshell. Like I said, it’s not necessarily heavy on features, but it looks good and if you’re just starting out with WordPress, it’s a really good template to just kind of play around with.

And I think if you play around with it long enough, you can create some really cool pages and a really cool website with it. Personally, I probably won’t use it very much, just because I’m better off with custom templates and what not.

But if you’re just starting out with WordPress and want to see what it can do and what you can do with it, it’s a great default template to begin with.

But I also want to hear from you. What do you think of Twenty Twenty? Do you like the way it looks? Do you wish it could do more? Be sure to leave those down in comments below. I’m really curious to see what the community thinks of it.

But until next time, happy WordPressing!