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.

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 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