Roots Starter Theme

Roots is a WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 Boilerplate that will help you make better themes.

• Source: https://github.com/roots/roots
• Homepage: http://roots.io/
• Documentation: http://roots.io/docs/
• Twitter: @rootswp, @retlehs, @swalkinshaw, @Foxaii, @c2foryou, @austinpray
• Newsletter: Subscribe
• Forum: http://discourse.roots.io/

Features

• gulp for compiling Sass and LESS, checking for JavaScript errors, live reloading, concatenating and minifying files, and versioning assets
• Bower for front-end package management
• HTML5 Boilerplate
  • The latest jQuery via Google CDN, with a local fallback
  • The latest Modernizr build for feature detection
  • An optimized Google Analytics snippet
• Bootstrap
• ARIA roles and microformats
• Theme activation
• Theme wrapper
• Cleaner HTML output of navigation menus
• Posts use the hNews microformat
• Multilingual ready and over 30 available community translations

Go further with Roots

Clean up WordPress

Install the Soil plugin to enable additional features:

• Cleaner output of wp_head and enqueued assets
• Root relative URLs
• Nice search (/search/query/)

Modernize your WordPress stack

Bedrock gets you started with the best development tools, practices, and project structure:

• Dependency management with Composer
• Automated deployments with Capistrano
• Easy environment specific configuration

Installation

Clone the git repo - git clone https://github.com/roots/roots.git - or download it and then rename the directory to the name of your theme or website.

If you don't use Bedrock, you'll need to add the following to your wp-config.php on your development installation:

define('WP_ENV', 'development');

Theme activation

Reference the theme activation documentation to understand everything that happens once you activate Roots.

Configuration

Edit lib/config.php to enable or disable theme features and to define a Google Analytics ID.

Edit lib/init.php to setup navigation menus, post thumbnail sizes, post formats, and sidebars.

Theme development

Roots uses gulp as its build system and Bower to manage front-end packages.

Install gulp and Bower

Unfamiliar with npm? Don't have node installed? Download and install node.js before proceeding.

From the command line:

1. Install gulp and Bower globally with npm install -g gulp bower
2. Navigate to the theme directory, then run npm install

You now have all the necessary dependencies to run the build process.

Available gulp commands

• gulp — Compile and optimize the files in your assets directory
• gulp watch — Compile assets when file changes are made
• gulp --tasks — Lists all the available tasks and what they do

Documentation

Roots documentation is available at http://roots.io/docs/.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome from everyone. We have contributing guidelines to help you get started.

Community

Keep track of development and community news.

• Participate on the Roots Discourse
• Follow @rootswp on Twitter
• Read and subscribe to the Roots Blog