New WordPress Theme Twenty Eleven – First Look

So it looks like the Theme Wranglers over at Automattic are getting close to completing the first version of the new Twenty Eleven WordPress theme which is based on the excellent Duster theme created by Automattic and recently released in the theme repository in April.

The team are working hard to ship V1.0 of Twenty Eleven with the next version of WordPress, 3.2.

I was up for a bit of semi productive procrastination this evening so I checked out the latest development version of WordPress from the trunk and took Twenty Eleven for a spin.

Here’s the initial scoop.

Twenty Eleven Unboxing

The first thing I noticed after firing up Twenty Eleven and dropping in a couple of hundred blog posts using the fantastic Dummy Content plugin was that the header image is really big. Too big in fact. There is an ongoing discussion about this on the WordPress development blog. In my humble opinion it should be reduced in size. While the dev team point out that it is easily resized (and this is indeed true – take a peek in functions.php and look for the HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT value to change the default height.) there is an awful lot to be said for good defaults. The reality of the situation is that most newbies won’t resize the header image – at least not initially. I predict a LOT of forum posts on said height reduction if this stays as is right now. Here’s a screen grab of just how big that bad boy is on my 15in Mac Book Pro screen.

Note, you can’t even see the first blog post!

Compare this with Twenty Ten on the same instance of WordPress.

Lots more real estate on show by default there. In my view, the default header image height in Twenty Ten is perfect. As Goldilocks once said, not too big, not too small.

UPDATE: 12 May 2011: The default height was bugging Dalton Rooney too. So much so in fact Dalton just pushed out a really handy little plugin in record time to allow users to change the banner dimensions from within the Appearance menu. Great little addition Dalton. Works perfectly.

Let’s leave aside the default header image height and delve a little deeper.

HTML 5 Goodness is everywhere

Twenty Eleven is written with HTML5 which is great news for Theme Developers who will undoubtedly spin off many child themes and different instances of Twenty Eleven as happened with Twenty Ten after it was released in erm 2010.

Theme Coding Standards

You would expect no less than first class coding standards from Automattic and with Twenty Eleven expectations are met and exceeded. The theme is heavily commented throughout which should make customisation a breeze for those who choose to get their hands dirty. I think this is one of the big reasons that so many people chose to adopt Twenty Ten as a proxy theme framework.

Showcase Template

Twenty Eleven comes with a Showcase page template which is a nice addition and allows you to quickly add a nice content slider to your website. Make any page use the Showcase page template and then make that your showcase page your homepage via the Readings Settings in WordPress and BAM! you’ve got a nice showcase page template which also allows for widgets to then be added to the left hand side of your main post. Additionally the next 9 posts are displayed in summary format below the first main post which gives the Showcase template a more interesting template that your conventional blog homepage. Nice.

 

 

Here’s an example of the Showcase template in action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damn header is still too big even with a 100px. height on the header image 🙂

Post Formats

Post Formats are fully integrated into Twenty Eleven. The presentation of same is a little flat at the moment and I think that Automattic could spend a bit more time to refine this to make sure users know how good they can be.

Colour Schemes

The theme comes with 2 Color Schemes – Light and Dark. Light is the default but I adore the dark version! Dark themes are tough to pull off but Twenty Eleven looks fantastic gone dark.

Typography

I love the attention to detail paid with regard to typography with this team and there improvements all over the place on Twenty Ten.

Theme Size/Speed

Given the simplicity and lack of imagery used within Twenty Eleven, it’s super fast to load and quite small in filesize (my instance above is under 200kb on initial load.

There’s lot more to Twenty Eleven and I’m sure there will be more changes to follow before this thing actually drops.

Looking forward to playing more with Twenty Eleven in the near future.


Comments

15 responses to “New WordPress Theme Twenty Eleven – First Look”

  1. Yeah, that header image is just insane. And you’re right, nobody is going to change the default. I thought there was going to be a built-in function for 3.2 that allowed dynamic header image resizing? Maybe I was wrong…

    1. Hey Dalton, yeah they have an open ticket for it http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17242 but it looks like it didn’t make the 3.2 beta freeze cut off.

      Hopefully 3.3 will follow quickly thereafter!

      Ed

  2. OK, this was really bugging me, so I made a plugin for it:
    http://madebyraygun.com/lab/resize-twenty-eleven-header/

    It’s just a quick and easy way to reset the header image size to whatever you want. This should help until the flexible header size feature gets into core.

    1. Dalton,

      You’re a star!

      I’ll edit this post to make sure people know about your plugin. Fair play to you. They’ll be queuing up for this one once 3.2 hits final release 🙂

      Ed

  3. Twenty Eleven arrive ! | David Latapie

    […] de Word­Press et je men­tion­nais Twenty Eleven.Twenty Ele­ven arri­vera avec Word­Press 3.2 (détails sup­plé­men­taires). Il sera codé en HTML 5, ce qui résou­dra mon dilemme Twenty Ten ou […]

  4. I hope that they fix up the Showcase template, i think its a nice feature but it and the header are way bigger than it needs to be. I like how they implemented the HTML5shiv.js for IE and used the placeholder elements.

    1. Hey Brad,

      Yes it’s coming together nicely. I’m sure they will tidy things up a bit before the 3.2 release is finalised.

      Ed

  5. […] great Thesis versus Automattic debacle of last summer.But our favorite juicy coverage involves the upcoming Twenty Eleven theme preview from Automattic.There are also some great tips on using WordPress with the high performance […]

  6. […] Įdomiausia pasirodė tai, kad ji turi specialų puslapio šabloną, su kuriuo galima susikurti gana dailų pradžios puslapį. Daugiau nieko įspūdingo, eilinė solidi ir gana daili tema, bet man senutė TwentyTen žymiai […]

  7. I’d really like to see them choose a grid system for Twenty Eleven (960.gs, Blueprint, 1140 CSS, whateverThermal current formatting makes it really tedious to change.

    1. Hey Mike,

      Twenty Eleven incorporates a lot of responsive web design concepts so it’s unlikely the core team would use something like 960.gs or Blueprint but could in theory use something like the 1140 grid system. I think it’s really down to personal developer preferences. It wouldn’t be that difficult to port Twenty Eleven to 1140 I think.

      Ed

  8. skylos Avatar

    Is that middle part below the headers and above the widgets shown above (in the “Showcase template in action” image) suppose to be a slider?
    Because I’m “stuck” with the single page’s content. Also it’s background is grey.

    1. it is a slider yes – did you follow the setup instructions? If so, you might have a plugin conflicting with the js for the slider – try switching off your other plugins and see if that makes a difference.

  9. Maybe i can suggest http://www.borgyborgy.net where you can find some free 1000×288 pixel size headers, to customize default TwentyEleven theme. All images are taken by me and provided under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

  10. Thanks for this information. It’s a great one.

    However, I have a little challenge with this theme. I want to change the colour of the spaces within the SIDEBAR and around the post area to have the same colour with the OUTSIDE BACKGROUND.

    What should I do please.Thanks

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