[wp-hackers] default theme being the crown or not

[Chip Bennett]

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 7:39 PM, IC IC <icwordpress at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is it safe to assume that the default theme is the crown of all themes
> and therefore, making it the parent theme makes the most sense?
>

Certainly not - at least, not necessarily. There is no universally correct
answer to this question. The correct answer depends on your needs and
circumstances.

>
> Please answer this question from a point of view that the rule is you
> have to build your theme from scratch! You are in need of selecting a
> parent theme.
>

Are you building a Theme from scratch, or are you creating a Child Theme of
an existing Theme?

>
> So what do you pick?  One of the freely available ones like the
> thematic, hybrid etc... or no, go with the default theme and start
> there...
>

Again, it depends on your circumstances, and what you need from a Parent
Theme.

>
> The reason for this argument would be that the default theme is
> updated all the time with every release and written/maintained by the
> same core developers who worked on those updates first hand, therefore
> it would be safe to assume that whatever they did for that version of
> WP would be implemented the best way? And whenever you get a new
> release, your parent theme is up to date.


And therein lies one problem with using the default Theme: the current
intent, as stated by the core devs, is to change the default Theme once per
year. Last year, the default Theme was Twenty Ten. This year, the default
is Twenty Eleven. Next year, the default Theme (at some point) will be
Twenty Twelve. Now that Twenty Eleven is the default, core-bundled Theme,
Twenty Ten probably isn't getting the same attention it did when it was
bundled with core. It is still maintained by the same team of developers
(note: not necessarily directly correlated to the same developers who work
on the rest of WordPress core), but is probably only seeing bugfixes. Next
year, Twenty Eleven will probably be in the same situation.

So, if you go that route, you'll need to be prepared to change your Parent
Theme once per year if you want to continue to take advantage of the
year-to-year improvements in the default Theme.

Chip