Since the decision was made to update the WordPress default theme every year, I’ve contributed to all five new WordPress default themes. My contributions have varied from inline documentation, to accessibility testing, to refactoring PHP to cleaning up some JavaScript (and many things in between). Since Twenty Fourteen had it’s spectacular debut, the talk has already begun on the next one.

Konstantin Obenland proposed the idea that Twenty Fifteen should be a simple theme. Take _s and just add CSS. While that is a noble idea, I think we could also challenge ourselves to rethink themes completely for Twenty Fifteen. Since Twenty Fourteen was released early (Before we even hit Twenty Fourteen!), we have plenty of time to be experimental.

I would like to propose that Twenty Fifteen be a single page app largely done in JavaScript. This will require the addition of the Rest API the WP API team is building, but would enable us to demonstrate what is possible for a theme with almost no PHP. Imagine a theme where the only PHP is functions.php and index.php.

Maybe this is just a crazy idea. I don’t know. But I do know that we as a community can challenge ourselves to build something amazing.