Unbundle older themes

[hlashbrooke]

If this is not on the roadmap at all then please just close this ticket.

It seem unnecessary to have the older default themes still bundled in core. Twenty Fourteen is stable and shows off WordPress' default functionality well. I propose removing all themes prior to Twenty Fourteen (i.e. Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, Twenty Twelve & Twenty Thirteen), or maybe keeping only the current theme and one prior (currently Twenty Fourteen & Twenty Thirteen) as having two bundled themes would demo the theme selection page a little bit more for new users.

Removing all of the older themes would reduce WP core by about 3.6 MB, which is obviously a win, but if all the themes are still included for a good reason then feel free to ignore everything I'm saying :)

[TobiasBg]

WordPress 3.8 shipped with TwentyFourteen, TwentyThirteen, and TwentyTwelve, which is a good consensus given that the themes target different audiences (magazine-style, blogging-style, etc.), and given the time of release for TwentyFourteen (before the named year and not in the second half as happened in the previous years). So, fresh installs only get those. If a site is upgraded and had previous default themes installed, those will be kept.

Related: #22500

Unbundling TwentyTwelve and maybe TwentyThirteen should probably not be necessary until TwentyFifteen ships.

Suggesting "Future Release" to leave it as a reminder.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Discussion on bundled themes in 3.8:
​https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-dev&day=2013-12-04&sort=asc#m743968

[hlashbrooke]

I saw that we have all the way back to Twenty Ten in trunk, so figured we were going to be including them in each release. Perhaps we should remove them from truck then? Seeing as though the are in the themes repo anyway.

Makes sense to have all three themes in the release if they each serve a specific purpose, so happy to close this ticket off.

Thanks for the IRC logs Sergey!

[SergeyBiryukov]

So, older themes (Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven) are still in the repository, but they're not actually bundled anymore. We still accept patches for them here, so I guess we're going to keep them in the repository for now.

The discussion on which themes to bundle happens when a new default theme is ready. Older themes are excluded from zip packages during the build process, so this would be a ticket for the WordPress.org milestone, but we probably don't need a separate ticket for that.

[hlashbrooke]

Gotcha - thanks for clarifying all that :)

Feel free to close this ticket if necessary.

[ocean90]

#31991 was marked as a duplicate.

[paaljoachim]

What about a code snippet to automatically remove the older themes....?
It would be a halfway there solution.