Replied to What is up with the 2020 WP Theme by autumnautumn (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Curious if anyone has any experience with the new 2020 theme. I’m particularly confused as to why on fresh install it seems like an out of the box theme. But then if you touch the Customizer at all it fills your site with all this content for a musume in Sweden!?!?!

I like using the customizer to change the look and feel of my site but it seems I can’t use it with this theme without it doing this dump of content.

Can anyone point me to articles about this theme and why this content is supposed to help me? Maybe this is just a new way of working with a theme that I’m not used to?

Autumn, It’s been a while since I’ve done a fresh install, but I’ll confirm that what you’ve experienced is true. The base theme was shown off using a Swedish museum, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear that portion, but I too was a bit freaked out by the content they created on my behalf.

From what I can tell, they’re creating the content to help users realize how to set up a separate front page and a separate blog page which isn’t always intuitive to newcomers to the platform. Fortunately they haven’t made too much useless content and new users can simply either edit the front page the theme creates to something that suits them or just delete that page and create something of their own.

The only other content I can see that one might want to modify are the two footer widgets that you can either edit or simply delete or replace.

In all I think they’ve taken this route simply to give new users an idea about how they could set up their sites and give them an idea about the way the theme uses the Gutenberg editor. (It’s not too different from the long standing “Hello World” introductory post or the “Hi, this is a comment.” first comment on a fresh install.) For people new to WordPress this is probably pretty helpful, though for older hands it may be annoying. Fortunately the content the customizer creates is pretty minimal and easy to get rid of.

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

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