Remove Default WP Themes From Core

bedrock
1

Anyone know how to eliminate the automatic download of the default WP themes (Twenty Fifteen, etc)?

Would like to remove them from the admin to clean things up.

5 Likes
2

Use Bedrock :smile:

You can remove this plugin or just have WP_DEFAULT_THEME defined

4 Likes
3

I’m a little slow. I’m using Bedrock and already see this snippet, but I have all the default WP themes in my project.

4

Right, that is pointing WP to the themes in the web/wp/wp-content/themes directory. Removing it will only show themes in web/app/themes.

1 Like
5

Ok, I’ll just deregister. Thank you.

6

By deregister, do you mean delete the file web/app/mu-plugins/register-theme-directory.php in your project? Because that’s all you need to do…

2 Likes
7

yea I just commented it out.

8

For those like me using Trellis, here is how it seems to me is the best-est way to do it.

Since it’s a configuration you’ll probably want on all your environments, thus edit ./site/config/application.php

Around line 39 you should see:

define('CONTENT_DIR', '/app');
define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', $webroot_dir . CONTENT_DIR);
define('WP_CONTENT_URL', WP_HOME . CONTENT_DIR);

Add a line right underneath:

define('WP_DEFAULT_THEME', CONTENT_DIR . '/themes');

Done.

5 Likes
9

I had thought WP_DEFAULT_THEME is for defining the default theme - but it seems to be setting the theme directory instead? Is there any documentation for this?

10

It’s setting the theme directory, not a specific theme. I haven’t noticed that constant mentioned in the docs but a quick check of the code shows this to be the case.

1 Like
11

Thanks for this. Looking closer though, it looks like this constant is ultimately used for setting the default theme; check it out:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/5.0.2/src/wp-includes/default-constants.php#L361

The code from Bedrock that you referenced seems to be setting up a directory to contain themes, but only if the default theme constant isn’t set.

12

this has to be define('WP_DEFAULT_THEME', 'CONTENT_DIR' . '/themes'); (note the single quotes around CONTENT_DIR) - otherwise it will throw a php-error …

13

These solutions merely hide those themes, but they do not stop them from downloading as the original poster requested.

There is a PR on github to address this

The solution there is similar to this one, but more targeted:
https://discourse.roots.io/t/setup-bedrock-without-installing-twentyten-twentynineteen-themes/16704

There are a couple of related issues on Github

1 Like
14

PS, if you want to also remove them from sites that already have them downloaded, then you would need to use not the post-root-install-package callback, but also the post-update-cmd. So in that case, rather than the code in the Github PR, the Scripts section of your composer.json would look something like this

  "scripts": {
"post-root-package-install": [
  "php -r \"copy('.env.example', '.env');\"",
    "composer run remove-old-wp-themes"
],
"post-update-cmd": [
    "composer run remove-old-wp-themes"
],
"remove-old-wp-themes": [
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentyten",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentyeleven",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentythirteen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentyfourteen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentyfifteen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentynineteen",
  "rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twentytwenty"
],
"test": [
  "phpcs"
]

}

15

Additionally you could adjust your remove-old-wp-themes script to be like:
rm -rf web/wp/wp-content/themes/twenty* so it’s all in one rm.