14 DAY TRIAL // Maybe a bit later than it should have been, but WordPress has finally unveiled the official default theme for 2012. It's called, what else, Twenty Twelve, and it will be the default theme for anyone that installs the upcoming WordPress 3.5 on their own or starts a new WordPress.com blog.
The new theme is probably the biggest departure from the previous one so far. It's built from the ground up to face the realities of today's web, for one, that mobile is big and getting bigger, and two, that no one runs "just a blog" anymore.
With that in mind, the creators made a team that works on any device and on any screen, from low end Android smartphones all the way up to Retina display MacBooks. New WordPress blogs will be ready for any visitors.
"Twenty Twelve is an elegant, readable, and fully responsive theme that makes your site content look its best on any device. A key component of this theme is a special homepage template," WordPress boasts.
"Recently, it’s become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog. The homepage template meets this need by allowing authors to craft a perfect introductory page—it’s the first thing visitors see," it explained.
WordPress is still a blogging platform at heart, but with more and more people using it for CMS, it might as well embrace it. Still, this is the first time that the default theme doesn't look like a blog due to the big emphasis on the homepage and static content.
Among the nice touches, the new theme also uses the Open Sans typeface by default, which should make for a nicer, cleaner text compared to the fonts of yesteryear. If you're using WordPress.com, you can already check out the new theme, otherwise you'll have to wait until it's made available for download or wait for WordPress 3.5 to come out.