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. Install Grunt, and then install the dependencies for Roots contained in package.json by running the following from the Roots theme directory:

npm install

If you’re using Nginx you’ll need to add the Roots rewrites to your server config before the PHP block (location ~ \.php$) to use the clean URLs feature:

location ~ ^/assets/(img|js|css|fonts)/(.*)$ {
  try_files $uri $uri/ /wp-content/themes/roots/assets/$1/$2;
}
location ~ ^/plugins/(.*)$ {
  try_files $uri $uri/ /wp-content/plugins/$1;
}

Reference the theme activation documentation to understand everything that happens once you activate Roots.

Theme Development

After you’ve installed Grunt and ran npm install from the theme root, use grunt watch to watch for updates to your LESS and JS files and Grunt will automatically re-build as you write your code.

Configuration

Edit lib/config.php to enable or disable support for various theme functions and to define constants that are used throughout the theme.

Edit lib/init.php to setup custom navigation menus and post thumbnail sizes.

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
• Theme activation
• Theme wrapper
• Root relative URLs
• Clean URLs (no more /wp-content/)
• All static theme assets are rewritten to the website root (/assets/*)
• Cleaner HTML output of navigation menus
• Cleaner output of wp_head and enqueued scripts/styles
• Nice search (/search/query/)
• Image captions use <figure> and <figcaption>
• Example vCard widget
• Posts use the hNews microformat
• Multilingual ready (Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Serbian)

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.