Hi Annette, thanks for having us! We’re Yann and Diane Collet, the sibling co-founders of Twentig.

I’m Yann, a designer, and Diane is a developer. We’re from France and are currently based in Paris. And yes, at the moment it’s just the two of us working on Twentig, though we’re open to growing the team in the future.

We’ve each been working with WordPress for over a decade now, building websites and themes for a variety of clients. Our work has been recognized by the Automattic Design Awards, where we won two trophies in the Best Site and Best Style categories. So in a nutshell, we’re a small but mighty team of two, leveraging our complementary skills in design and development and extensive WordPress experience to build Twentig.

With our extensive WordPress experience, we wanted to create a tool to help people build beautiful, creative websites more easily. That’s how Twentig, our first public plugin, was born 4 years ago – it’s a culmination of our design and development expertise packaged into a user-friendly solution. We decided to supercharge the default theme, as it is the first introduction to WordPress for millions of new users.

We’re passionate about empowering WordPress users and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with the block editor. Enhancing existing WordPress core blocks rather than creating custom ones allows us to provide a sustainable and user-friendly experience for our users. This approach enables users to build upon the familiar foundation of core blocks, making the learning curve smoother. The name „Twentig“ pays homage to WordPress’s tradition of naming its default themes after years, as „twenty“ originates from the Old English „twentig“. It signifies both respect for WordPress’s foundations and our commitment to extending its capabilities.

The transition from classic to block themes has been relatively smooth for Twentig, as we’ve found block themes to be more straightforward and flexible to work with compared to classic themes.

Regarding the unpredictability of the Gutenberg project, we’ve adapted by embracing the changes and adjusting our approach as needed. When WordPress core introduces features that overlap with existing Twentig functionality, we simply deprecate our features and utilize the core features instead.

Honestly, our primary challenge lies in increasing the visibility and adoption of the Twentig plugin, rather than technical hurdles related to theme changes or Gutenberg’s ongoing development.

I’m happy to hear you find the portfolio feature useful! We decided to focus specifically on portfolios based on frequent requests from our users who wanted a simple, streamlined way to showcase their work and projects on their websites.

Although we named it a „portfolio,“ this feature is quite versatile. It allows you to customize the permalink structure to remove the word „portfolio“ from the URL. This flexibility enables it to be adapted for a variety of use cases beyond just a traditional creative portfolio. You can think of it as a distinct content type that lets you showcase items separately from regular posts and pages.

Our goal was to provide an intuitive, easy-to-use solution for a common need, while still offering enough customization options to make it valuable for many different types of websites and content requirements.

We’ve just decided to align the launch of Twentig One with the WordPress 6.6 release to take full advantage of important theme-related features that were shifted from the 6.5 release. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for our users, and we believe this timing will allow us to achieve that. For our subscribers, we’re aiming to offer a beta version of Twentig One prior to the official release. We’ll share more details on this as soon as everything is finalized.

Twentig One is thoughtfully designed to showcase the power and flexibility of block themes while maintaining the elegant simplicity and attention to detail our users expect from Twentig. It will be fully compatible with our Twentig plugin, ensuring a seamless site building experience.

As for the name, „Twentig One“ could imply that this is the first in a series of block themes from us, or perhaps it suggests this is „the one“ theme you’ve been waiting for! We’ll have to let the future reveal what’s in store, but we’re excited about the possibilities.

We’re big fans of the block editor and its full site editing capabilities. It has become an incredibly powerful tool that keeps improving with each WordPress release, empowering users to build impressive websites.

If I could change one thing, I feel the navigation block could still be more intuitive within the block editor interface. Streamlining the user experience for managing navigation menus would be a welcome improvement. But it’s not an easy task.

We’re working on a major update for our plugin that will introduce exciting new block features. By combining our plugin, upcoming theme, and website templates, we aim to provide an all-in-one WordPress design toolkit. Our mission is to deliver high-quality design and empower our users to create truly exceptional WordPress websites.