Every few years, WordPress quietly does something that tells you where the whole platform is heading: it ships a new default theme. Not a marketing theme, not a demo, the actual theme that lands on millions of brand new sites the moment someone installs WordPress for the first time. That theme has to work for a total beginner out of the box, and it has to show off whatever WordPress itself thinks matters most right now. A new WordPress default theme is the clearest public signal the platform ever gives about where it is heading.
The next one is called Ipsum, and it is heading into WordPress 7.2 this December. We read through it line by line, not because we are switching BuddyX to be a blogging theme. Community sites need a lot more than a blog does.
A default theme is the closest thing WordPress has to a public answer key. It shows you, in working code, what the people building WordPress core think a well built theme should be doing in 2026.
We found six things Ipsum does that BuddyX does not do yet. None of them require rebuilding BuddyX from scratch. All six are already turning into real work, tracked and scheduled, not a someday idea. Here is what we found, and what it actually means for the community site you are running or planning to run on BuddyX.
- More style variations to choose from, without a more cluttered picker
- More visual depth and polish, out of the box
- A site that feels smoother the moment someone clicks
- Smarter live content in your community blocks
- Fewer bugs reaching your site before you ever see them
- A clear line on what we are deliberately not copying, and why
Why a WordPress Default Theme Is Worth Reading Closely
If you have never thought about why a “default theme” matters, here is the short version. WordPress core is deliberately conservative about what it recommends. It does not chase every trend. When something shows up in the default theme, it usually means the underlying feature has matured enough that core is comfortable putting it in front of a first time user with zero configuration. That is a much higher bar than “a plugin added support for it.”
So when we compared BuddyX against Ipsum, we were not asking “does BuddyX look as plain as a blogging theme.” We were asking a more useful question: which of these underlying capabilities has core decided are ready for prime time, and are we using them yet on the theme that runs your community, your course platform, or your membership site?
More Looks to Choose From, Without a Cluttered Picker
BuddyX already ships what we call Site Skin: a set of ready made color and style variations you can switch between in a couple of clicks, no design skills needed. Our dedicated design tokens and style variations guide walks through how that system works today. Right now there are eight of them, and each one bundles a color palette together with a specific typography choice. Pick “Dark,” and you get dark colors with the typeface that ships alongside it. Pick “Editorial,” and you get its colors with its typeface. You cannot mix and match.
Ipsum does something smarter. Instead of building whole combined variations, it builds color palettes and typography sets as separate, independent pieces. Seven color moods on one side, five typography pairings on the other. Because they are separate, WordPress’s built in Style Book can combine any color mood with any typography pairing. Seven times five is thirty five different looks, built from thirteen small files instead of dozens of big ones.
For a community site owner, here is why that matters in practice. Say you run a fitness coaching community (we wrote about how coaches are already doing this on BuddyX in our member community guide for fitness and wellness coaches) and you love the warm, energetic color mood, but you want a calmer, more legible typeface for your longer training articles than the one that mood ships with by default. Today, you cannot do that without custom CSS. Under the approach Ipsum uses, you just pick the color mood and the type pairing separately, in the Site Editor, no code involved.
We are restructuring BuddyX’s Site Skin the same way: separate color files, separate typography files, mixed freely in the picker. The design work is already done since we own all the palettes and typefaces already in use. It is a rebuild of how the files are organized, not a redesign. That means way more looks to choose from, without the picker itself getting any more cluttered or confusing than it is today.
More Depth and Polish, Out of the Box
Ipsum’s theme.json (the settings file that controls what options show up in the block editor) declares a set of shadow presets. That sounds technical, but the effect is simple: when someone building a page in the block editor wants to add a subtle drop shadow under a card, an image, or a button, they get a small set of good looking, pre-tuned options in a dropdown, instead of staring at a blank “custom shadow” field with no idea what values look good.
BuddyX does not declare this setting yet, so anyone wanting a shadow on a block has to guess at values or skip it. Adding this is a small, low risk change: one setting, a handful of presets tuned to match BuddyX’s existing look. The payoff is that community pages, event cards, member spotlight blocks, pricing tables, all of it, get a bit more visual depth without anyone needing to know what a box shadow even is.
A Site That Feels Smoother the Moment Someone Clicks
This one is almost embarrassingly small in terms of code, and genuinely noticeable in terms of feel. Ipsum adds three lines of CSS that turn on the browser’s built in View Transitions feature. In browsers that support it (most current versions of Chrome, Edge, and Safari), clicking from one page to another on the site produces a soft crossfade instead of the old hard flash of a full page reload. Browsers that do not support it yet just load the page normally, nothing breaks, nothing looks wrong.
For a community site where members are constantly moving between activity feeds, group pages, profiles, and course lessons, that small bit of polish adds up. It is the kind of detail people notice as “this site feels nice” without being able to say exactly why. We are adding the same three lines to BuddyX. There is essentially no downside and no real engineering cost, which is exactly the kind of change we like shipping quickly.
Smarter Live Content in Your Community Blocks
This is the one with the most long term upside, and it needs a bit more explaining. WordPress core recently added something called the Block Bindings API. In plain terms, it lets a block editor block display a live, dynamic value (something that changes, like a number or a piece of text pulled from elsewhere) without a plugin having to hack together a shortcode or a custom bit of code just to make that happen. Ipsum uses it for something simple: showing a “join the conversation” message that changes depending on whether a post already has comments.
For a community platform, the real opportunity is bigger. Right now, if you want a block on your homepage to show a live member count, an active group count, or an upcoming event countdown, that usually means either a shortcode, a widget, or a small custom snippet someone has to maintain. Block Bindings gives us a core native way to wire that kind of live data straight into ordinary blocks, so it behaves like a normal part of the page instead of a separate add on that needs its own plugin logic bolted on.
Here is what that looks like for a few different kinds of communities running on BuddyX:
Fitness and coaching communities
A “This week: 42 members logged a workout” block on the homepage, pulled straight from your BuddyPress activity data, no shortcode plugin required.
Course and education communities
A live “128 students enrolled, 12 seats left in this cohort” counter on a course landing page that updates itself as people join, instead of a number someone has to update by hand.
Nonprofit and volunteer communities
We covered a related need in our guide to the best LMS options for nonprofits: a live “volunteers trained this month” or “hours logged this quarter” block that nonprofit staff can drop into any page without asking a developer to build a custom widget.
Local and real estate agent networks
A live “24 agents active in your area” block on a directory or landing page, built from ordinary member data instead of a paid directory plugin add on.
None of this requires a new plugin ecosystem. It requires BuddyX registering a small set of binding sources for the data we already have access to (member counts, group counts, activity counts) so that any block on any page can pull them in natively. That is the direction we are taking this.
Why This Beats the Shortcode Plugin You Are Probably Using Today
If you already have a live member count or a live event countdown on your site, there is a decent chance it got there through a shortcode plugin, a widget with its own settings panel, or a small PHP snippet a developer wrote for you once and now nobody wants to touch. All three of those approaches work, but they share the same three weak points.
- Extra weight. They usually load their own separate bit of code on every page they appear on, even a simple one, which adds up across a busy community site.
- Quiet breakage. They tend to break when a theme update changes a CSS class name or a page layout shifts, because the shortcode was never really part of the page, just dropped into it.
- A second settings screen. Editing them usually means finding the right panel buried in a plugin’s admin menu, not the same block editor you already use for everything else on the page.
A block binding does not have those problems, because it is not a separate system sitting next to the block editor. It is the block editor. The live number is just a normal paragraph block or a normal heading block that happens to be told where to pull its text from. Editing it, moving it, restyling it, all of that works exactly the way editing any other block already works, because it is not a special case anymore.
How We Actually Went Through Ipsum’s Code
We did not go off the WordPress.org announcement post alone, since announcement posts describe intentions, not always the finished code. We pulled Ipsum’s actual repository, opened its theme.json file directly, and compared its settings, key by key, against BuddyX’s own theme.json. We opened its functions.php, all 142 lines of it, and read every function to see what WordPress core itself considered necessary for a modern theme to work. We looked inside its styles folder to see exactly how the color and typography files were split apart. That is where the composable variations pattern became obvious, not from a description of it, but from seeing seven small color files and five small typography files sitting in their own folders instead of one large combined file for each look.
We did the same close comparison against Reign, since Reign shares the same theme.json based settings architecture as BuddyX, just built for a different kind of community (marketplaces, course platforms, job boards, on top of the same design token system). Every gap we found in BuddyX showed up in Reign too, which is exactly what you would expect from two themes built on the same foundation, and it is why both themes are getting this work at the same time rather than one first and the other as an afterthought.
Fewer Bugs Reaching Your Site
This last one is entirely behind the scenes, and it is the kind of thing you will never see directly, only feel the absence of problems from. Ipsum runs an automatic check before every single code change is allowed to be saved, one that verifies the theme’s core settings file is actually valid and has not been accidentally broken. If a developer makes a typo or an unintended change to that file, the check catches it immediately, before it ever ships.
BuddyX does not have this safeguard yet. We are adding the same kind of check to our own development process for both BuddyX and Reign. It will not change anything you see or click on. It changes the odds that a broken settings file ever makes it into a release you install, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous, boring reliability work we would rather do quietly than have you discover the hard way.
What We Are Not Chasing, and Why
We want to be straight with you about the biggest difference between Ipsum and BuddyX, because it is tempting to read “WordPress’s new default theme does X” as “therefore every theme should copy X entirely.”
Ipsum is what WordPress calls a full site editing theme, meaning literally every part of it, headers, footers, single posts, archives, is built and editable entirely inside the block editor, with no traditional PHP template files behind the scenes. That works beautifully for a blogging theme with no dependencies.
BuddyX is not built that way, and switching it over completely right now would be the wrong call. A community platform depends on BuddyPress, and often on forums, courses, memberships, and online stores as well. None of those systems have a mature, fully block based way of handling their templates yet. Converting BuddyX to full site editing today would mean rebuilding a huge amount of working, tested functionality on top of features that are themselves still evolving in WordPress core, for a payoff that is genuinely uncertain right now.
Instead, we are doing what actually moves the needle for you: continuing the move away from the old Customizer and Kirki based settings system toward the same theme.json token approach Ipsum uses, something we already started and wrote about in BuddyX Without Kirki: The Essential 5.1.0 Customizer Guide. That is the real path to a leaner, more modern BuddyX. Chasing full site editing before the tools around BuddyPress and community features are ready would slow that path down, not speed it up.
A Few Questions We Expect You Will Ask
Do I need to do anything to get these changes?
No. Everything described here ships as part of normal BuddyX and Reign updates. There is no migration step, no setting you need to find and turn on, and nothing that changes how your existing pages look the moment you update. The composable style variations add new mix and match options without removing the combinations you already have saved. The shadow presets and view transitions are additive. None of this touches your content or your BuddyPress data.
Will this slow my site down?
No, and this is worth being specific about since community sites are already juggling BuddyPress, possibly a course plugin, and often WooCommerce on top. Style variations and shadow presets are settings, not extra scripts, they cost nothing at page load. View transitions are a native browser feature, not a JavaScript library we would have to ship and maintain. Block bindings replace a shortcode plugin’s own loading logic with something the block editor already loads anyway, so if anything, sites that adopt it in place of a heavier shortcode plugin should get slightly lighter, not heavier.
Does BuddyPress or Reign’s marketplace and LMS features affect any of this?
Not for the pieces described here. Style variations, shadows, view transitions, and the theme.json validation hook all live at the theme level and work the same regardless of which plugins you have active. Block bindings will roll out gradually, starting with the data BuddyPress already exposes (members, groups, activity), with Reign’s marketplace and LMS integrations (WCFM, Dokan, LearnDash, Tutor LMS) following as a second wave once the BuddyPress bindings are proven out in the wild.
Why look at a competitor’s default theme instead of just building what we think is best?
Ipsum is not a competitor, it is WordPress core itself, the software every WordPress theme including ours is built on top of. When core ships something in its own default theme, it is effectively telling every theme author which underlying browser features, editor APIs, and settings patterns it considers mature enough to build on. Ignoring that signal means either reinventing the same idea worse later, or missing it entirely. Reading it closely and deciding what genuinely fits a community platform, and what does not, is exactly the kind of decision we think you want us making on your behalf.
What This Means for You Right Now
None of this is a wishlist. We opened tracked development cards for BuddyX and Reign covering the composable style variations, the shadow presets, the root padding fix, the view transitions polish, and the block bindings groundwork. This is scheduled work, not a roadmap slide.
If you are running a community, a course platform, a membership site, or a local business directory on BuddyX today, here is the practical takeaway: the theme you are already using is about to get more ways to look different without more clutter, a bit more visual polish for free, a smoother feel when members click around, and eventually, smarter live blocks that show real data about your community without needing another plugin.
If you are still deciding what to build your community on, this is also part of the answer to “why BuddyX.” We are not guessing at what a modern WordPress theme should do. We read what WordPress itself just shipped, kept what genuinely helps a community site, and left out what would only help a blog. If you want to see where BuddyX stands today before any of this lands, our full BuddyX theme review covers everything currently shipping, free and Pro.
We plan to keep doing this kind of comparison every time WordPress core ships something significant, not just for default themes but for major version releases too. A community theme that stops paying attention to what the platform underneath it is doing tends to age badly, first in small ways nobody notices, then all at once when a plugin or a browser update exposes how far behind it has drifted. Reading the source, testing what actually applies to a BuddyPress powered site, and being honest about what does not, is how we would rather spend our time than guessing.
If any of the fitness, education, nonprofit, or local community examples above sound close to what you are building, the best next step is simply to try BuddyX on a free WordPress install and see how the current Site Skin and starter patterns feel before any of this new work lands. Everything described in this article is additive, so whatever you build today keeps working exactly as it does now, and picks up each of these improvements as they ship.