Back in February we introduced you to _s, or Underscores, the WordPress starter theme we use at Automattic to build the majority of our themes (and even when we’re not building themes from it we’re referring to it). It’s come a long way since then with a steady stream of refinements. But one thing about it has always been … less than refined. To fork _s you’d have to do a, well, OK, kind of annoying search and replace routine that could easily trip people up if they did it wrong. Thanks to the efforts of Hugo Baeta and Konstantin Kovshenin that isn’t the case anymore. And they’ve done away with that problem with incredible style. Themers, check out Underscores.me:
You can now download your own version of _s with your own custom theme name — the search and replace is all done for you. All you have to do is theme. Plus, you can see all the beautiful people who have contributed to your favorite WordPress starter theme. Look at them all! Community theme development, FTW.
So, what are you waiting for? Get over to Underscores.me and start developing that awesome theme. We can’t wait to see it.
It’s worth highlighting that _s development is now 100% on Github: https://github.com/automattic/_s. We’d love to see you fork it and make your own version— and then if you find bugs or have ideas for improvement send it in via pull requests.
It’s also worth highlighting that we’re using http://underscores.me on the Theme Team ourselves instead of forking _s manually.
Is there any way (or plans for a way) to pull _s down from this site (with the customizations) via the command line?
There isn’t yet but that would be really cool. It’d be fun to do via a Sublime Text 2 plugin.
I fooled around a little bit with
curl
to try and send a request withPOST
data, but was stymied and gave up. I don’t think it would be too difficult for somebody with a little more know-how to accomplish though.Here’s a
curl
snippet that should do it.I ended up taking this idea a bit further and wrote an interactive command tool. I called it _sh and it’s on Github.
Do you plan on turning this into a Sublime Text 2 plugin as well, Evan? Those are written in Python.
I’ve never written a SublimeText plugin, but I do use it as my main editor so the idea is interesting to me. I read some of this tutorial on writing ST2 plugins this weekend, which seems very thorough.
I’m not sure how soon I’ll get to it, but in the meantime if anyone else wants to take a shot and submit a pull request I’d be happy to merge it into my _sh repo on Github.
You should have a look at _sh, by Evan Solomon. That seems to be just what you’re looking for! 🙂
https://github.com/evansolomon/_sh
Absolutely fantastic idea, I might get more “stuck in” now! 🙂
This is some really fantastic work, guys! I’ve seen a lot of people have trouble with the find/replace on _s, doing steps out of sequence and messing it up, etc. This makes _s even more accessible 🙂
Bookmarked!
I was absolutely dreading changing all the name spaces again, so thanks for saving me the time 🙂
P.S. The site itself looks spiffy too.
No love for Theme Bakery (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-bakery/)? 🙂
Hey Ian
Taking some inspiration from underscores.me and the command line suggestion I’ve forked the project into my own repo (https://github.com/buggy/_s), performed a minor restructure and wrote a build.php script to allow people to build their own theme via the command line. It’s as easy as
% php build.php new_theme
If this is a direction that you’re interested in going then email me. I need to do some more testing and would like to add a couple of extra options for separate theme name/prefix, author name, etc but it could be finished tomorrow.
I’ve also got some thoughts about adding support for theme.options file that would allow people to specify theme options using something as simple as
{section label=”Section 1″}
{text name=”field1″ label=”Field #1″}
{/section}
Rich
Great job guys!
That’s nice and useful
Quick question about category.php file.
Does _s theme have one or does it use that file or is it handled differently?
Thanks.
It has an archive.php template that handles that view — we found that category.php wasn’t necessary or useful for most of the themes we looked at. If you really need one it’s pretty simple to make one using archive.php as an example.
Can this be used as a blank theme to build commercial themes from ground on?
Yep, it sure can.
Nicely done. This is my new #1 starter theme, very easy to use and understand. Thanks. 🙂
It would be really cool for those of us trying to come up to speed on WordPress to have a redux of The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial using underscores. I found The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial very helpful. However, it would be more useful to have that tutorial walk thru the benefits of underscores since that appears to be the best starting point from which to build themes.
For my own efforts, underscores which a bit much to figure out all at once. I used toolbox to begin migrating Smittie’s Ramblings from MovableType to WordPress (current progress can be seen here).
Thanks the great tools.
I’m pleased to announce that we are publishing a second edition of the tutorial! You can follow along with the lessons as they are posted, starting with the introduction.
Yipeee 🙂 From now on, it’s my new starter theme ! Thanks a bunch.
This has been insanely valuable for us. We used _s theme as the basis for the new Skematik framework – http://www.skematiktheme.com – as we combined it with Twitter Bootstrap. It’s nice to know everything from the foundational level is taken care of with _s
I have just downloaded the theme! Thanks
Nicely completed . Good job guys
I’ve dug around for a few days on this and underscores seems to fully bridge the gap between _how my clients believe wordpress is the only cms in existence_ and _me wanting to bother explaining how and why it sucks_. Can someone, please, just make a wordpress framework/plugin/theme that’s geared toward a) giving clients a way to manage news, images, blog posts (yeah right), and twitter/fb/app.net/instagram stuff? Stop respecting wordpress and start respecting the medium. WordPress is over. We need to move on from the blog mentality for good. I think _s is a great start…please people…fork the sh*t out of this and discuss…