Roots Starter Theme

Roots is a WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 Boilerplate & Bootstrap 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:

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

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 git://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.

Install gulp

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 101 — A guide to installing Roots, the files, and theme organization
• Theme Wrapper — Learn all about the theme wrapper
• Build Script — A look into how Roots uses gulp
• Roots Sidebar — Understand how to display or hide the sidebar in Roots

Contributing

Contributions are welcome from everyone. We have contributing guidelines to help you get started. You can help out by:

• Reporting issues (please follow the issue guidelines)
• Fixing issues
• Suggesting new features
• Answering questions on the forum

Support

Use the Roots Discourse to ask questions and get support.