Meet Ipsum, WordPress’s next default theme — and what else 7.2 has in store

Per Gutenberg Times’ latest weekend roundup, Gutenberg 24.0 is out, the roadmap to WordPress 7.2 is public, and the project’s next default theme finally has a name. Good week for anyone doing custom WordPress theme development to pay attention to.

What shipped in Gutenberg 24.0

• Post title changes now show up in revisions with a proper diff, so you can actually see when a rename happened instead of guessing
• The Gallery block gets a Grid variation with configurable column count and “crop images to fit,” settable per breakpoint
• Site Title now supports fit-text, scaling to the available width instead of a fixed size
• Close to 100 icons were redrawn on a stroke-based grid

Meet Ipsum, the next default theme

For the first time in 16 years, WordPress’s next default theme isn’t named after a year. Ipsum, built by Henrique Iamarino with Carolina Nymark, Maggie Cabrera, and Juanfra Aldasoro, ends the “Twenty-” naming convention that started with Twenty Ten. The reasoning, per the team: default themes now get their own names and change when the design calls for it, not on a calendar schedule.

Ipsum itself is intentionally spare — blog-first, minimal typesets, structural elements that stay invisible until needed. It’s on GitHub now for testing.

The road to 7.2, landing December

This is a security-heavy cycle by WordPress’s own standards:

• Sudo mode gates sensitive admin actions behind re-authentication
• A new Secrets API gives plugins and integrations a first-class way to store credentials, instead of everyone rolling their own
• Application Passwords get hardened
• Notes gains a suggestion mode and emoji reactions; Global Styles picks up form element customization and custom block states

Release parties also move from in-person events to livestreamed webinars starting with 7.2, so distributed release squads can actually attend.

One practical flag: if any client site — or any of your own tooling — relies on Application Passwords for an integration, it’s worth testing against a 7.2 beta once one lands, rather than finding out what changed in December.

Source: Gutenberg Times