Today, WordPress Ended a 16-Year Tradition… Meet Ipsum!

WordPress just broke one of its longest-running traditions.

Today, the WordPress team unveiled Ipsum, the proposed new default theme for WordPress 7.2. But the biggest news isn’t really Ipsum itself.

WordPress is moving away from the familiar year-based naming convention behind Twenty Ten, Twenty Twenty, Twenty Twenty-Five and, until very recently, the planned Twenty Twenty-Seven.

Going forward, WordPress says default themes will have their own names and will change when the design calls for it — not simply because another year has arrived.

After 16 years, the Twenty Something era is coming to an end.

Meet Ipsum

Its replacement couldn’t be much further from an elaborate showcase theme. Ipsum is deliberately minimal.

Named after lorem ipsum, the placeholder text designers have stared at for decades, Ipsum is built around blogging and designed as a blank canvas users can make their own.

The theme keeps things intentionally quiet, with restrained typography, dotted-underlined links and style variations capable of changing the appearance of the page, including its images. Headers, hero sections and sidebars are available when they’re wanted but stay out of the way when they’re not.

WordPress says every current style combination passes WCAG AA. But that simplicity wasn’t always the plan.

WordPress Was Building Something Much More Ambitious

Months ago, the team started developing a different default theme called Mētis.

Mētis was conceived for writers, makers and thinkers and was deliberately more expressive. Instead of beginning with Figma mockups, the team built real demonstration pages directly inside the WordPress Editor to explore what Gutenberg could now do.

Then the project changed direction.

According to today’s WordPress Core announcement, after reviewing Mētis with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, the team decided the theme bundled with WordPress should instead be the simplest possible starting point.

WordPress describes Mētis as powerful and opinionated, but says Mullenweg gave direction to pursue a simpler blank-canvas approach that could appeal more quickly to more people.

So Mētis was out — at least as the default.

It will remain a separate theme and won’t ship with this release. Ipsum is now WordPress’s proposal for the WordPress 7.2 default.

That’s a Surprisingly Big Shift

Default WordPress themes have traditionally done two jobs.

They give someone a usable website immediately after installing WordPress, but they’ve also acted as showcases for what the latest generation of WordPress design can do. Those goals aren’t necessarily compatible.

A showcase wants personality. Interesting layouts. Typography. Ideas. It should make designers open the theme and think, I didn’t know WordPress could do that. A starting point arguably wants the opposite. It should get out of your way.

Ipsum makes WordPress’s new direction pretty clear. And it raises a much more interesting question than whether you like the theme itself:

Should the default theme of the world’s biggest CMS inspire you, or should it practically disappear?

WordPress appears to be leaning toward the latter.

Twenty Twenty-Seven Barely Got a Chance to Exist

Here’s where today’s announcement gets particularly interesting.

As recently as September 9, WordPress’s official 7.2 Release Squad announcement referred to the upcoming default theme as “Twenty Twenty-Seven.”

There had even been an official Twenty Twenty-Seven: Team Announcement earlier in the development process. One week later, WordPress is proposing Ipsum instead — and explicitly moving away from year-based names.

The tradition dates back to Twenty Ten, which arrived with WordPress 3.0 in 2010. Since then, year-based names have become such a familiar part of WordPress that you could practically predict the name of a future default theme years in advance.

Not anymore.

WordPress says future default themes will have individual names and will change when the design calls for it rather than according to the calendar.

That potentially gives individual themes longer lives and removes the expectation that WordPress needs another flagship design simply because another year has arrived.

Don’t Install Ipsum on a Production Site Just Yet

There’s one important caveat to today’s announcement.

Ipsum isn’t finished.

WordPress calls it a proposal for the next default theme, and what’s available today represents the design work so far. Formal development review still has to happen.

The team is releasing it now specifically so designers and developers can test it, find what breaks and report what’s missing while there’s still time to make changes.

And that window isn’t enormous.

According to the official WordPress 7.2 schedule, beta testing begins in October, with the final WordPress 7.2 release scheduled for December. So Ipsum itself could still evolve. But the bigger change announced today is much clearer.

After 16 years of Twenty Something themes, WordPress is moving on.

And perhaps the most surprising part is what it’s proposing instead: not a louder showcase of everything Gutenberg can do, but something deliberately quieter.

WordPress isn’t just changing the name of its default theme. It’s rethinking what a default theme should be.

Meet Ipsum

Alex Harper

Alex Harper is a web designer and UX specialist with 8+ years of experience creating intuitive, user-friendly digital experiences. Known for blending creativity with functionality, Alex helps brands turn ideas into seamless designs that engage and inspire.