Roots is a WordPress starter theme that has been growing in popularity due to its ease of use and collection of technologies. For starters, Roots includes HTML 5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap and Grunt. Let’s take a quick a look at some of the features and how to use it. Check out the documentation to learn more! The Roots team has even released a couple of Screencasts.
Features
- Minimal, accessible markup
- Write less code with the theme wrapper
- Theme activation jump start
- Bootstrap ready
- Optimized for production use
- Clean URLs, even with WordPress
Here’s what people are saying about Roots:
From the beginning, Roots just made sense to me. Logical code organization and everything seemed to be in its place. It’s just a great consistent base that I’ve worked into to the workflow here at our agency.
– Dan Egan
Plugins
Roots also has released some plugins that you can use in conjunction with the theme starter, some of these plugins include Soil, Stage Switcher, Roots Rewrites, Roots Wrapper Override and HTML Boilerplate .htacess.
Getting Started
To get started, you can download Roots from the GitHub page. Let’s take a look at the directory structure to learn more about the starter theme:
Assets
You can see that the assets directory contains the css, fonts, images, javascript and less files. At this time of this writing, Roots does not support Sass. However, there is another project that you might be interested in if you are a Sass user: Roots-Sass.
Lang
The ‘lang’ folder includes the PO and MO files for theme translation / localization:
Lib
The lib contains some of the files that contain theme functions ( for sidebars and other template files):
Templates
The templates folder includes some template files that includes the sidebar, footer, header among others.
The Blog
The Roots theme has a blog that you can read that includes updates and features added to the theme framework.
Resources
Roots Starter Theme Review: Building with Roots Pros and Cons