A New Base Theme

The first WordPress theme I ever built was a modified version of Kubrick. I think that’s how most front end developers get started with WordPress- tweaking a core theme or a commercial theme to make it fit. Building one entirely from scratch has never made a lot of sense to me and over the years I’ve used a number of different theme platforms to build on.

History

toolbox-screenshot

I had a love affair with Thematic for a couple years. It was one of the early “frameworks” and a precursor to newer projects like Genesis. It was great if the design fit into the general structure of the theme, but I often found myself writing ten lines of code in order to unhook and rehook different sections of the theme for really minor changes. It was difficult to trace functions across multiple files. Although it made me a much better developer and was excellent for some projects, overall it seemed unnecessarily complex.

Next for me was “Toolbox“. This was a base theme developed by Ian Stewart, the same developer who had started Thematic. It was the complete opposite of a framework: a real simple theme, well structured, and easy to modify. It also followed the HTML5 spec (remember when that was new?!). I built my first publicly released theme (Portfolio Press) off of it as well as several projects for clients.

After Ian took a job with Automattic, Toolbox was forked and became Underscores. More on that over here. It’s an excellent base and many of the themes on WordPress.com are built off of it. There’s a great team of developers maintaining and contributing to Underscores. The code is clean, well commented, and the model of excellent WordPress practices.

Time to Fork

Fork

However, over the last few months I’ve found myself having to do more and more work to get Underscores to where I need it before embarking on a new project. I’ve decided it’s time to fork.

This is not a bad thing of course. Underscores is intended to be base in which to build off of, even if you’re forking it to build your own new base. And a solid base theme is important for any WordPress theme developer- it allows you to move quicker because you don’t need to solve the same problems for every project.

The main reason I’ve decided to fork Underscores is because of build tools. (Though re-using patterns for menus and comments will also be helpful.)

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