Modern WordPress Development with Roots

I have been working on and off as a web developer and mainly with WordPress for over 15 years. I worked with different frameworks such as Genesis, Thesis, Canvas and Divi. I also worked or dabbled in a few starters themes such as _s . And often I have customized themes that customers found / bought on Themeforest. And as these options became less and less appealing to me I started to look for something else. That choice has become Roots

Reasons why I am moving

The reasons why I am moving more and more of my projects to Roots with Bedrock as a modern WordPress stack, Ansible for provisioning and Sage as a starts theme are many. Allow me to go throught the most important ones.

Efficiency

To learn a new theme every time a client decides this is the theme for him or her is tiresome, tedious and NOT efficient. It will require you to read new documentation, get familiar with different theme panels and coding techniques used by the developer in question.

Quality

Also there are many themes out there on Themeforest and other places that just have not been coded well. Often themes inject CSS and javaScript in odd ways making it hard to override CSS using a child theme, lack options which require me to use lots of plugins, adding lots of files to the stack, making it hard to optimize the site. Sometimes pages are not even valid causing different displays in different browsers.

Something missing

Most of the time these starter themes or frameworks had something I liked, but they were always lacking something or were not rigid enough in the way they were set up to truly offer clients high end themes and get them these in the quickest way possible.

Support

When you create your own code, or know a starter theme inside out you can provide your own support. When you use a theme that is supported by WordPress experts you have people to fall back too. Roots is such a warm and fuzzy place.

Roots to the rescue

When you create a product for a client don’t do something half-assed. Deliver quality and know your product. Good quality products attract good quality clients. And that is something we all want right?

Modern WordPress Development with Roots to the rescue! Roots is a all encompassing framework. Not a WordPress framework, but a place where people help you build better WordPress sites, become a better programmer and build sites faster. This by providing you with a Modern WordPress Stack: Bedrock, efficient provisioning system with Ansible and a kick ass starters theme called Sage.

This does not mean this will be easy. Learning a new work structure takes time, but believe me this is worth it. I am only a beginner, but I have been convinced and as a new enthusiast I will do my best to bring you over to the dark side too 😉

So what is modern WordPress Development with Roots? Well it is a package that helps you set up your local, staging and production environments, put together a modern WordPress Stack AND provides you with a very effcient WordPress Starters Theme to deliver awesome WordPress sites your clients will love!

Bedrock

• Bedrock Modern WordPress Stack- Better folder structure, Dependency management with Composer, Easy WordPress configuration with environment specific files, Environment variables with Dotenv, …

Bedrock-Ansible

• Bedrock-Ansible – Easy server provisioning with Ansible (Ubuntu 14.04, PHP 5.6 or HHVM, MariaDB), Local Vagrant Package, One-command deploys, WP CLI,..

Sage

• Sage Starters Theme – Roots Starters Theme managed with NPM asset builder, Bower for front end package management, Gulp for image optimization, concatenationan and minification and sass/less compiling and error checking, Browser Synch.

See next post(s) with more details on Bedrock, Bedrock Ansible and Sage:

Bedrock
Bedrock Ansible – To be added
Sage – To be added
Roots WordPress Stack Workshop