This past week, WordPress 4.1 was released. While distraction-free writing is nice (I am using it now), the best part of the release for end users is probably the new default theme, Twenty Fifteen.
I decided to follow the pattern of releasing a new theme each year by creating my own derivative theme for every default WordPress theme. Twenty Fourteen was in some ways my first attempt at this (though I didn’t do much in the way of customization), and you can read more about the AidanMontareDotNet Themes Project there.
While Twenty Fourteen got me started, for the new year I want to work towards a well-designed derivative theme that fits my website cleanly. I am working on integrating more modern web development tools into my workflow, which is currently being described here. I have already learned how to use Sass and Compass for styling development, and am working on converting the style.css file into Sass files. I will also be implementing some elements of the Zurb Foundation framework.
After that, my immediate goal is to fit the Twenty Fifteen theme to my website. You can see a preview of my work at my theme page. I will switch my website over to the new theme when the new year begins.
Even after that, development will surely continue as I work towards implementing many of the nifty ideas I have had for this site. While I don’t expect anyone to use my theme as a drop-in replacement for the default theme, I hope that some might be interested in my enhancements. The public Git repository should make it easy to learn how I did things and enable others to implement the same idea.