Development

Required tools

Theme uses NPM as a front-end dependency manager and Composer as a back-end dependency manager. Make sure your development machine has installed following dependencies:

• Node.js
• NPM
• Composer

Building a Theme

Webpack is used to compile and optimize theme's scripts, stylesheets, and images.

Resolving dependencies

Before being able to build theme you have to resolve required dependencies.

# @ wp-content/themes/<theme-name>

# Install composer dependencies.
$ composer install

# Install node dependencies.
$ npm install

Now you have all the packages necessary to run the build process and start developing your theme.

Building a Theme

There are a few available commands which help you to build the theme for different environments:

# @ wp-content/themes/<theme-name>

# Compiles unminified and unoptimized theme assets with source maps.
$ npm run development

# Alias for `development` command.
$ npm run dev

# Compiles minified and optimized theme assets without source maps.
$ npm run production

# Alias for `production` command.
$ npm run prod

# Builds assets for development, runs watcher (recompiles on change)
# and BroswerSync (refreshes browser).
$ npm run watch

Handling project dependencies

Front-end dependencies

All of the front-end packages necessary for your theme can be found in the package.json. Of course, you can specify and install other packages required by your project with npm install command or by adding additional fields to the package.json file.

# @ wp-content/themes/<theme-name>
npm install foundation-sites

Builder helps you also with importing third-party stylesheet libraries. Instead of referring path directly to the node_modules/ directory, simply include it with ~ at the beginning. Builder will take care of it for you.

@import '~foundation-sites/scss/foundation';

Thanks to Babel you can use all of ES6 goodness. Especially, importing external scripts as modules.

// ES6 Modules
import $ from 'jquery'

Backend-end dependencies

The starter is configured to pull in Composer’s autoload file. All you need to do is require the desired package.

# @ wp-content/themes/<theme-name>
composer require monolog/monolog

Afterward, it will be available inside every component of the project. Just import package namespaces and use it.

use Monolog\Logger;
use Monolog\Handler\StreamHandler;

Customizing build process

Builder rules and procedures are stored in the build/ directory. Default settings of the builder are contained in a webpack.config.js and app.config.js files. These settings are extended with theme's config/app.json configuration file where you can easily overwrite defaults.

Customizing assets filenames and output paths

You can control outputted names with environment variables in .env file. For example, we want to output our .css files inside a styles folder.

FILENAME_CSS="styles/[name].css"

Filenames have to use Webpack placeholders to determine asset name or extension.

Below you will find all available environment variables and used filenames placeholders

Giving access to the global variables inside theme's scripts

To bypass conflicts with global variables, scripts outputted by Webpack are enclosed inside a scope. This force you to say explicitly which external variables you want inside theme scripts.

By default, starter gives you access to the jQuery shipped with WordPress.

{
  "externals": {
    "jquery": "jQuery"
  }
}

Simply add to the list new entry where the key is a name (under which external will be available) and the name of the global variable as value.

{
  "externals": {
    "jquery": "jQuery",
    "backbone": "Backbone"
  }
}

Now, you can import this variable inside your theme scripts.

import Backbone from 'backbone'