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
Newsletter: Subscribe
Forum: http://discourse.roots.io/

Features

Grunt for compiling LESS to CSS, checking for JS errors, live reloading, concatenating and minifying files, versioning assets, and generating lean Modernizr builds
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, with lean builds with Grunt
- An optimized Google Analytics snippet
Bootstrap
Organized file and template structure
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

Additional features

Install the Soil plugin to enable additional features:

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

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

If you'd like to use Bootstrap Sass, look at the Roots Sass fork.

Install Grunt

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

From the command line:

Install grunt-cli globally with npm install -g grunt-cli.
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 installs front-end packages defined in bower.json.

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

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

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 Grunt
Roots Sidebar — Understand how to display or hide the sidebar in Roots

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.

keitaroo/roots