A starting point for Wordpress Themes, built with Foundation and Bourbon mixin library.

It is packaged as a submodule of WordPress-Skeleton, Fork

• bower: npm install bower -g Manage your libraries.
• A SASS and Javascript compiler. I recommend you use Gulp with the provided gulpfile.js, or Codekit.

The theme will prompt you to install these plugins automatically. Thanks to Thomas Griffen's Plugin Activation Class.

• Advanced Custom Fields. Fantastic plugin for creating custom fields. I never leave home without it. Some built in theme functionality will not work without it, but it won't fail catastrophically without it, however.
• Advanced Custom Fields Objects. A powerful OOP library for using ACF custom fields. Requires ACF, naturally. Thanks to Brian Neff for this.
• Custom Post Type UI. Not strictly necessary, but I deem it required! It makes creating custom post types and taxonomies a breeze.

• ACF Flexible Content. Add multiple layouts with unique subfields (paid ACF add-on).
• ACF Options Page. Add custom global site options (paid ACF add-on).
• ACF Repeater Field. Add repeatable fields with subfields.
• (Advanced) Post Types Order. Re-order your posts/custom post types. Pro version requires a license.
• Gravity Forms. Probably the best form plugin for WP. Probably. Requires license.
• Admin Menu Editor (Pro). Edit the WP Admin menus to your heart's content. Pro version requires a license.
• iThemes Security. Formerly Better WP Security. A good idea, in general. Unless you want hackers.
• W3 Total Cache. I mainly use this for managing a generic mirror CDN on my local site copies. But it provides some powerful caching too.
• Manual Image Crop. This should be part of the core media library functionality. Lets you crop your images individually for each defined image size.
• Force Regenerate Thumbnails. Like it says, regenerates all your image sizes.
• Relevanssi Replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine, with lots of features and configurable options.
• Wordpress SEO by Yoast Provides various SEO optimization features.

• Make sure you have Node, NPM and Bower installed on your system. Gulp is also recommended for building, but you could use Codekit or some other build tool your grandma made.
• Run bower install to install the latest version of Foundation and its dependencies, Bourbon mixin library, and other JS dependencies.
• If you're using Gulp, run npm install to install node module dependencies for build processes.

This theme presumes you have a working knowledge of how to create Wordpress themes.

• Learn about theme development
• Handy cheat sheet for template hierarchy and file naming

If you are using Gulp...

• Rename gulpfile-sample.js to gulpfile.js, and replace %%YOUR LOCAL URL HERE%% with your localhost development URL.
• Run gulp server task to start the BrowserSync server and start watching files for changes.
• SCSS and Javascript files will automatically be compiled, and changes will appear immediately.
• See gulpfile.js for additional tasks you may want to run manually.
• Do your thing.

theme.class.php

This file contains and initializes our main theme class. All theme setup and customizations should go here.

functions.php

This file is loaded by Wordpress when the theme is loaded, so we bootstrap here.

It is also used as the name suggests, to create theme functions to be used in template files.

Located in functions.php

This is a general purpose template include function. It will look for a PHP file matching the naming stucture {$prefix}-{$name}.php within a directory tpl_{$prefix}s (note the 's' at the end, the pluralization of the $prefix).

So calling tpl('foo','bar'); will look for tpl_foos/foo_bar.php.

The function also has an optional $params array, so you can pass any custom parameters to that function. It is recommended that you extract($params) at the beginning of each template file, so the parameters will be available as variables in the template, but you can reference them directly from the params array if you really want to.

Located in tpl_{prefix}s/{prefix}_functions.php

Individual templates may (or may not) have more specific template functions that make use of the tpl() function. Each template type may have its own functions file with functions for one or more templates within that directory. This allows you to create custom template functions with unique parameters that follow the same conventions.

It is highly recommended that you mark up the template functions and files with detailed comments that explain the available variables.

tpl_templates/tpl_index.php

This is an admin-selectable page template which allows any page to be used as a post type "index" page. It is meant as a replacement for WP's standard index and archive templates, which are just shy of useless.

By selecting this template for a page, an additional select-box is displayed allowing the user to select a public post type. This page will then display a paginated list of posts from that post type below its main content.

The ACF field group for this is automatically registered in includes/acf_index_post_type_fields.php. The select box is populated with post types in the _acf_load_index_post_type() function in functions.php.

functions.php

A few helpful functions to use in your theme

get_index_vars() Used on the index page template to get several variables related to the index.

get_paged_vars() Get an array of useful variables associated to the current page number.

page_has_family_tree() Check if a page has a family tree, i.e. it has children or ancestors

get_page_tree() Get the page hierarchy associated with a page

add_descendents() Recursive function to add an array of child posts to any post object

nested_list() Generic recursive function to generate a nested list of posts or taxonomy terms

truncate() Truncate any string of HTML. The function is aware of HTML tags, and will auto-close any broken elements. Thanks to Brian Neff for this.

dump() Echo some preformatted data for dev/debug.