Which Wordpress theme to use as basis for theme development?

CMS & WordPress
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I’m just reading Sitepoints “Build your own wicked Wordpress themes” and I’m learning a lot. They recommend using Thematic as a starting point, but this no longer seems up to date.

could anyone recommend a good theme to use as a solid basis to develop my own theme? Thanks.

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Personally, I’d take a close look at the ones that come with a clean install to start with, and see if the article’s ideas can be applied to that. The code should be in a good state of repair and current.

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This one http://underscores.me/

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I’ve not used it myself, I’ve only created simple themes from scratch or used themes out of the box, but Bones might be worth a look.

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Thank you. I thought of developing the 2016 theme, but I’m getting into difficulties working out what system they use for different screen sizes.

I might go back to using one of the Bootstrap themes I’ve used, but just wasn’t sure how well maintained or robust this theme is.

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I just took a poke around in the main CSS file for one of the included themes. What you find down near the bottom of that file is a series of @media queries. There are plenty of folk around here who can help you understand those if that’s what you need. The basis though, is that the media queries kick in when the screen size goes above/below the value the query is set for - they override the CSS rules set elsewhere in the file.

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Underscores.me is fully plain theme.

What’s that mean ?

You can simply integrate any other CSS framework into it, such as Bootstrap.

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I started with any of the “Nakid” themes;

create a child and off you go

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Thanks for your reply. Yes, I have seen the css @media rules in the main 2016 theme. However, I’d like to work with Bootstrap or something which gives a systematic way of dealing with different screen sizes. I imagine it might not be very clean adding the bootstrap media queries to the existing ones

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Thanks, I’ve had a look at underscore. However, it says “no child themes”, and I thought the advantage of using a child theme was that the main theme can be updated (eg with new version of Wordpress) and this would deal with any future proofing issues

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I think you’re right, that would take quite a lot of effort to convert across to something like Bootstrap.

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Thanks for saving me from trying!

Perhaps I’d better look for a Bootstrap ready theme to adapt if I can find one that is regularly updated and light-weight.

I’m sure there are other ways to do responsive, it’s just I’m familiar with Bootstrap.

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Child themes are good if you are using an out-of-the box ready-to-go theme. Because those themes are updated to keep up with changes to the WordPress core or to fix issues. And you don’t want to lose all your customization by overwriting it with the updated version of the theme.

As far as I know, the bare-bones themes such as underscores are different in that they are basically skeleton themes which you use to make your own theme, instead of using them as parent themes. They are meant for you to adjust them to suit your individual design needs.

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If you like Twitter Bootstrap & would be comfortable using that when developing a WP theme then you have 2 options:

  1. https://github.com/ptbello/_strap - I’ve used this in past, last update on this was Nov 2015.
  2. https://github.com/holger1411/understrap - looks to be active project, I have no experience with this

Both these combine the Underscores starter theme by Automattic with Twitter Bootstrap which makes building a new WP theme quite a breeze.

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Many thanks for your reply, I do appreciate it. I will look into those two options that you suggest.

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