WordPress Starter Theme

Version: 4.0.0

Author:

Matt Banks ( @mattbanks / kernelcreativemedia.com / mattbanks.me )

Summary

WordPress Starter Theme for use as a starting template for building custom themes. Uses SCSS and AutoPrefixr, HTML5 Boilerplate with Modernizr and Normalize.css, and Grunt for all processing tasks. Tested with WordPress 3.8.1.

Usage

The theme is setup to use Grunt to compile SCSS (with source maps), run it through AutoPrefixr, lint, concatenate and minify JavaScript (with source maps), optimize images, and LiveReload the browser (with extension), with flexibility to add any additional tasks via the Gruntfile. Alternatively, you can use CodeKit or whatever else you prefer to compile the SCSS and manage the JavaScript.

Rename folder to your theme name, change the style.scss intro block to your theme information. Open the theme directory in terminal and run npm install to pull in all Grunt dependencies. Run grunt to execute tasks. Code as you will. If you have the LiveReload browser extension, it will reload after any SCSS or JS changes.

• Compile assets/styles/source/style.scss to style.css
• Compile assets/styles/source/editor-style.scss to editor-style.css
• Concatenate and minify plugins in assets/js/vendor and assets/js/source/plugins.js to assets/js/plugins.min.js
• Minify and lint assets/js/source/main.js to assets/js/main.min.js
• ??
• Profit

To concatenate and minify your jQuery plugins, add them to the assets/js/vendor directory and add the js filename and path to the Gruntfile uglify task. Previous versions of the starter theme automatically pulled all plugins in the vendor directory, but this has changed to allow more granular control and for managing plugins and assets with bower.

Bower

Supports bower to install and manage JavaScript dependencies in the assets/js/vendor folder.

Image Optimization

To optimize images, run grunt imagemin. This was previously included in the default watch task, but there are currently a few issues with processing images multiple times and removing their contents.

Deployment

The theme includes deployments via grunt-rsync. The Gruntfile includes setups for staging and production - edit your paths and host, then run grunt rsync:staging or grunt rsync:production to deploy your files via rsync.

Features

1. Normalized stylesheet for cross-browser compatibility using Normalize.css version 3 (IE8+)
2. Easy to customize
3. Flexible grid based on work from Chris Coyier
4. Media Queries can be nested in each selector using SASS
5. SCSS with plenty of mixins ready to go
6. Grunt for processing all SASS, JavaScript and images
7. Much much more

Suggested Plugins

• Use Google Libraries
• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast
• W3 Total Cache
• Gravity Forms

Contributing:

Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute! Check out the Contributing Guidelines.

Contributors:

• ddropik

Credits

Without these projects, this WordPress Starter Theme wouldn't be where it is today.

• HTML5 Boilerplate
• Normalize.css
• SASS / SCSS
• AutoPrefixr
• Don't Overthink It Grids
• Underscores Theme
• Grunt