Kara v1.0
Ultralight 12kb blank WordPress theme
Description
This is intended for medium to advanced WordPress developers that plan on styling their website from scratch.
This is pretty minimal even for a blank theme. Contains no CSS resets, no object-oriented tomfolery, and contains only core HTML elements and WP functions. I also removed PHP comments because I feel the purpose of the little that’s there is self-evident (except for functions.php).
Kara, meaning “empty” or “void” in Japanese, is something I’ve developed after spending years working with WordPress’s template system. Every site I build basically comes from this code base, though this is the first time I’ve standardized it. Every line was hand-crafted with full knowledge of what it does. Many CSS classes and containers were removed; some were left behind only as a starting example. This exists primarily because I didn’t find “blank” themes to be “blank” enough.
You’ll notice that there is no archive.php (or any related pages such as tag.php) because I usually find it superfluous to use another view from the primary index.php blogroll. For categories, etc. I usually just use the .current-cat class in the sidebar to indicate category pages. In cases of extreme need, an is_archive() conditional can be placed inside of header.php to add a title, etc. In fact, a lot of customization can be achieved with CSS by paying attention to WordPress’s base classes.
This template may require some additional functions to get running based on preference, but overall was designed to omit everything possible that would end up going to waste. Included is Ryan Fait’s immaculate sticky footer, but if you’re familiar with this code you’d know it’s only 6 additional lines to the CSS and is incredibly paradigmatic (in my case, I removed his * selector for performance).
Compatibility
- 3.5.x
- 3.4.x
- 3.3.x
Features
- Hand-crafted HTML5-validated goodness
- Cleaned-up comment template
- Minimal
functions.phpfile that cleans up the WP head and contains CPT starter code - No ridiculous
includefile or self-righteous PHP template class for you to decipher - No CSS resets
- Only 6 starting lines of CSS
- Fewer than 10 starting IDs / classes
Includes
This plugin doesn’t include any libraries whatsoever, or make any assumptions as to how you code. However, it is set up to:
- Implement Ryan Fait’s sticky footer
- Set jQuery v2.0 to Google CDN (only because most plugins end up attaching their own jQuery version anyway)