Ian Dunn 5:58 pm on December 7, 2017

Should we change the default WordCamp theme to CampSite 2017?

TL;DR: Would CampSite 2017 be a better default theme than TwentyThirteen? It offers a more recent version of _s, accessibility improvements, and more customization options, but it may not be as easy to use for smaller organizing teams.

Background

Currently, when a new WordCamp site gets created, the TwentyThirteen theme is activated by default.

Earlier in the year, a team of contributors developed a new theme for all camps, called CampSite 2017. It’s based on the latest version of the _s theme, and includes some accessibility and customization improvements.

Feedback during the beta testing period was positive, and the theme has been available to all camps for several months now. So far, 9 camps have chosen to use it: Europe 2018, Jyväskylä 2018, London 2018, Europe 2017, Cologne 2017, Stockholm 2017, Phoenix 2017, Kuala Lumpur 2017, Zagreb 2017.

Recently, @sonjaleix suggested that it could become the new default theme, replacing TwentyThirteen, so I’d like to gather input from everyone about that. Since CampSite 2017 is a blank “starter” theme, we would also add some default styles to the Custom CSS section of the Customizer, so that teams without a designer don’t need to build them from scratch if they don’t want to.

Pros and Cons

These are the benefits and drawbacks, as far as I can tell, but please leave a comment if you see anything I missed:

Pros

It’s based on a recent version of the _s theme, which has hundreds of enhancements compared to the version available in the `WordCamp Base` and `WordCamp Base Redux` themes.
Includes the accessible menu improvements from the TwentySeventeen theme
Adds a ton of widget areas, to make it layout customization much more flexible
A “Day Of” template, so that on the day of the event, the site’s home page can easily contain the most useful information for attendees (like directions to the venue, the Code of Conduct, the schedule for that day, the Tagregator stream, etc)

Cons

It’s a bit more geared towards the needs of a large camp with experienced designers/developers on the organizing team. In particular:
The number of widget areas is great for customization, but could be frustrating to manage for camps that only want a very simple layout
It’s a blank “starter” theme, which could confuse some organizers. This would be mitigated by having the default styles that Sonja mentioned in the Meta ticket, but there may be some edge cases or particular workflows that aren’t covered.

Your thoughts

What do you think? Would CampSite 2017 be a better choice for the default theme than TwentyThirteen (or one of the other available themes)?

cc @kau-boy, @coreymckrill

Ian Dunn 6:00 pm on December 7, 2017

+1

I think the drawbacks are fairly minor in comparing to the benefits, and I don’t expect most organizers to have any significant issues. If we get feedback about problems, we can always iterate on the theme to address them, or switch the default back to something simpler.
Stefan Kremer (stk_jj) 6:04 pm on December 7, 2017

we presently use it for wuerzburg as well (cloned from WCEU17). It’s CSS is very sophisticated and I would be glad (though I can deal with it myself) if much of it could be transfered as an option to the customizer instead of having it as custom CSS
- Ian Dunn 8:57 pm on December 7, 2017
  
  That’s a good point. I’m not sure if we’d should use the WCEU17 CSS exactly, maybe a simpler version of it?
  
  What do you think, @kau-boy?
  - Bernhard Kau 10:43 pm on December 7, 2017
    
    I would also go with a little simpler layout. Maybe one that uses both available navigations.
danstramer 6:13 pm on December 7, 2017

Hi Ian,
Great topic!
I think that having a default-custom theme for WordCamps is the right way to go. It should all be standardized, making it easy for campers to easily navigate and get the info they need, and for organizers to have an easier time setting up their site.
I would even go a step further and add a feature for adding default pages / categories and content so organizers of a WordCamp would have an easier time setting up their site.Then, they would adjust the content per their needs.
I would also create a walkthrough guide even a video guide to show the best way to set up the site.
Seeing a badly designed WordCamp site before the event really turns me off.
As for the cons you listed – I think they are minor to the benefits we can have utilizing the above points.
By the way, is there a “help desk” for WordCamp organizers regarding site setup , design and content management?
Do we have case studies from previous WordCamps?

Dan
- Ian Dunn 9:02 pm on December 7, 2017
  
  adding default pages / categories and content so organizers of a WordCamp would have an easier time setting up their site.
  
  We do this already, but haven’t refreshed the default site content in several years. If there are things that are missing/outdated/etc, then it’d be great to start a discussion about that and identify all the updates that should be made.
  I would also create a walkthrough guide even a video guide to show the best way to set up the site.
  
  The handbook has a large section dedicated to this:
  
  https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/wordcamp-organizer/first-steps/web-presence/ (and child pages).
  
  We did have a video walkthrough awhile ago, but it became outdated, and is a lot more work to maintain than text documentation.
  
  If you’d like to contribute one based on the Handbook, though, that’d be awesome 🙂
  is there a “help desk” for WordCamp organizers regarding site setup , design and content management?
  
  Definitely! There’s the support@wordcamp.org email address, and the #community-events and #meta-wordcamp channels on Slack.
Francesca Marano 6:43 pm on December 7, 2017

Since CampSite 2017 is a blank “starter” theme, we would also add some default styles to the Custom CSS section of the Customizer, so that teams without a designer don’t need to build them from scratch if they don’t want to.

I think this is crucial if we want to have this as a starter theme, not every organiser is familiar with CSS.
Great work, thank you to everyone that made CampSite available 🙂
- Corey McKrill 6:24 pm on December 8, 2017
  
  +1
Lucijan Blagonic 6:50 pm on December 7, 2017

Hello everyone!

I’m all for changing the default theme to CampSite 2017! 🙂

This year as a part of WCEU18 design team, we are working on writing better style guide documentation and making it easier for other people to get started with the style guide/CSS. The main challenge we currently face is building a really good “Day of” and “Widget areas” use cases, which will better emphasize benefits of this theme. This was something we barely managed to tackle on last year since the theme was released relatively late.

I also love the idea of having a simple CSS that serves as a generic layout that can be customized further via Customizer. I think that would make more people receptive to the new default theme, although I know that some WordCamps just used the CSS from WCEU17 e.g. and changed the colours/graphics via find and replace.

Btw, if you are using the WCEU17, WCEU18 or WordCamp Style Guide (blank) CSS to power your WordCamp — let me know! We are collecting a list of all the implementations of the theme and are planning to create a gallery of all the websites, together with links to the style guide if they are available.

Lucijan
Kevin Cristiano 8:10 pm on December 7, 2017

I think making CampSite 2017 the default theme is a good idea. Being the default does not mean it has to be used, Organizers can always change the theme.

I particularity liked that this theme was vetted before being added. I’d liek to see that for all future themes that are asked to be added to wordcamp.org
Timi Wahalahti 10:15 pm on December 7, 2017

I really really love CampSite 2017 as WC Jyväskylä 2018 organizer, it has many great advantages for team with graphing designer and coder.

Yet I don’t feel that it should be default theme as for now, since it requires some what more customization than core default themes. Maybe we could bump default theme to be Twenty Sixteen, which is good, simple and works out of the box, but encourage usage of CampSite 2017 much more? Maybe a bit better documentation how it should be set up, how to use custom CSS and etc?

New wc.org instance should be usable and launch ready after a few very simple steps and imo changing theme shouldn’t be one of those steps – content should be prio 1. Tho i’d really happily see default theme to be CampSite 2017 at some point, but as said earlier, it needs a bit better default CSS before that.
NewYorkerLaura 12:17 am on December 8, 2017

Right out of the gate, I love that this theme was designed with WordCamps in mind with people who are very active in running camps as the creators. There’s so much to love about this. They know the needs and challenges.

At the same time, if someone wants to do something else, they have the freedom to do so. It’s the best of both worlds IMHO.
Emanuel Blagonic 6:49 am on December 8, 2017

+1 on making this theme default after adding some default styles.

Also, making it default, I don’t see it as a problem in edge cases, as there are edge cases with any theme anyways, and CampSite 2017 is a really good default theme for conference organizers (big or small).
- Sonja Leix 10:01 pm on December 28, 2017
  
  +1
Hugh Lashbrooke 7:19 am on December 8, 2017

+1 from me too.
Jenny 1:56 pm on December 8, 2017

+1 since you can clone a preexisiting design based on it.

if it becomes an issue, i rather we built a clone based off it rather then switching thenm back to twenty-whatever.
- Aditya Kane 2:30 pm on December 18, 2017
  
  +1

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