Essence is a WordPress theme that is a dream of Aaron Campbell’s that will hopefully be realized by the community. It is a WordPress theme that is built and maintained like WordPress. It is licensed under the GPL, completely free, and will be maintained by a group of lead developers, worked on by a larger group of contributors, lightweight, fast, flexible, and extremely extensible. It is not a new default theme. Twentyten and Twentyeleven are awesome for new users to be able to start a great looking site quickly and easily. Instead it is something that will be more like WordPress in that it will be basic and powerful, but mostly extensible.
The dream in a nutshell:
- The development would be guided by a small group of trusted developers
- Anyone would be welcome to contribute code based on a meritocracy much like WordPress.org (and probably closely tied to it)
- It would use the same 80/20 and “decisions over options” approach to development
- More advanced functionality would come from plugins that the theme is designed to work with. For example, I’d love to see the theme fully support Joost’s WordPress SEO plugin, giving it the hooks it needs to be as effective as possible.
- I’d like to see it support BuddyPress, forums (like BBPress), even E-Commerce (like Shopp)
- People that work in a niche (like publishing) would be able to make plugins that make developing a theme for their niche easier.
- It needs to be well coded, secure, and fast
- The most important thing is that someone should be able to easily create a child theme that inherits all this amazing functionality. It should not only make it easier to make a theme, it should make it easier to make a powerful theme that supports nearly everything WordPress supports.
If you want to get involved, contact us.