I’m all about using solid premium WordPress themes to start on a web project.
But what about when you want or need to really start from scratch when you’re themeing?
The brilliant folks at Automattic have released the starter theme of all starter themes.
Check this beauty out:
The _s Theme
Automattic calls it the “1000-hour head start:”
Have you checked out the Toolbox theme? Up until recently it was the starter theme we used to build free and premium themes on WordPress.com. Toolbox was (and is!) a great theme, but it could be better. Unfortunately, we wound up in a situation with Toolbox where we wanted to make some more drastic improvements to it as a starter theme but got a little stuck. We had people using it as a Parent Theme and that meant that the simplest id or class change could become a problem. Simply changing an id of #branding to #masthead in the template is enough to break most CSS.
And there were other more beneficial but potentially more disruptive changes we thought would be great to add to it. Changes like better starter styles, including a generic framework for adding your own responsive CSS; a script for elegantly handling menus on small screens; and easy-to-rework sample theme options. And whole lot more. The sort of things we found ourselves adding to 80% of the themes we were building. You know, the sort of things that you really need in a starter theme.
So, we forked Toolbox — don’t worry it’s still being updated — and made a better, faster, stronger, starter theme. A developer-only theme that gives us the freedom — us being the WordPress.com Theme Team — to iterate with abandon on the idea of WordPress starter themes. Since that theme underscores the new themes we build we call it the Underscores Theme, or
_s
for short.
Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?
So, from now on, before diving into a WordPress web project, I will be using Standard or _s, depending on what a need.
You can learn more about _s and it’s “features” on the Underscores website, and you can download and fork it on the Hub.
Also, if you jump on the Underscores website, you can input a name of your own custom theme, and it will spit-out a version of Underscore that has replaced all of the ‘_s’ with your theme name!
[via Themeshaper]
Daniel Milner says
This looks amazing! I’m always on the lookout for a better starter theme to build off of.
Eric Dye says
I’m working with it now, and I really like it. It’s from Automattic, so you know it’s going to be solid. The most barebones I’ve found!