Automattic’s theme team released a new set of theme components and, on top of that, five new starter themes built as scenario-specific extensions of Underscores. The collection covers common site types such as a traditional blog, a modern blog, a portfolio, a magazine, and a business site.
Developers can download a starter theme customized for each scenario from the Components website, with the relevant theme components already included.
Each starter theme includes layout structures that are common for its target use case. For example, the portfolio starter theme includes:
- A portfolio post type, provided by Jetpack
- A grid-based portfolio layout
- A single-column blog template
- A slide-out panel with navigation, social menus, and widgets
- A large full-width featured image layout
Right after activation, these themes do not try to do everything. That is intentional. The goal is to save theme developers time when building the right page structures, not to ship a massive all-purpose theme.
According to David Kennedy, one of the maintainers of Underscores, many excellent community pull requests were previously too specific to merge into a single universal starter theme. With Components, that code finally has a more suitable home.
The goal of Underscores Components is to give theme developers a more modular, use-case-driven starting point. Even if your own theme is not based directly on Underscores, many of the individual components can still be reused easily. The project is open source, and developers are encouraged to contribute.
