Roots 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
• Home Page: http://roots.io/
• Twitter: @retlehs
• Newsletter: Subscribe
• Forum: http://discourse.roots.io/

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.

Compiling CSS and JavaScript

Roots uses Grunt for compiling LESS to CSS, checking for JS errors, live reloading, concatenating and minifying files, versioning assets, and generating lean Modernizr builds.

To use it, install the required dependencies as directed and then run some Grunt commands.

Install Grunt

From the command line:

1. Install grunt-cli globally with npm install -g grunt-cli.
2. Navigate to the theme directory, then run npm install. npm will look at package.json and automatically install the necessary dependencies. It will also automatically run bower install, which references dependencies in bower.json.

When completed, you'll be able to run the various Grunt commands provided from the command line.

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

Available Grunt commands

• grunt dev — Compile LESS to CSS, concatenate and validate JS
• grunt watch — Compile assets when file changes are made
• grunt build — Create minified assets that are used on non-development environments

Configuration

Edit lib/config.php to enable or disable support for various theme functions and to define constants.

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

Documentation

Roots Docs

• 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 the Roots build script powered by Grunt
• Roots Sidebar — Understand how to display or hide the sidebar in Roots

Features

• Organized file and template structure
• HTML5 Boilerplate's markup along with ARIA roles and microformat
• Bootstrap
• Grunt build script
• Bower for front-end package management
• Theme activation
• Theme wrapper
• Cleaner HTML output of navigation menus
• Posts use the hNews microformat
• Multilingual ready and over 30 available community translations

Features from Soil

• Root relative URLs
• Nice search (/search/query/)
• Cleaner output of wp_head and enqueued scripts/styles
• Image captions use <figure> and <figcaption>

Contributing

Everyone is welcome to help contribute and improve this project. There are several ways you can contribute:

• Reporting issues (please read issue guidelines)
• Suggesting new features
• Writing or refactoring code
• Fixing issues
• Replying to questions on the forum

Support

Use the Roots Discourse to ask questions and get support.