Tag: Components

The Future of Underscores and A New Committer

The title may strike you as a bit ominous, but fear not. Underscores, our popular starter theme for WordPress theme development, isn’t going anywhere. As we continue to push for consistency in themes and imagine what they might become with Gutenberg, we’re bringing our attention back to Underscores. 🚀

For the last year and a half, we’ve experimented with a new starter-theme generator called Components. It was a way to make a few different theme “types” comprised of different components. The starter themes born from it brought with them more code and styles, and gave theme authors a bigger head start in their work. The generator we built to piece the different components together got complex quickly, though. We created a plugin to test builds locally and struggled with a seamless way to make many starter themes from one code base.

We learned a lot, though. We worked on Components at two team meetups, made almost 900 commits to the project and launched dozens of themes with it. However, we hit a point where we realized we had over-engineered parts of the project. The original idea is still solid: make starter themes do more by crafting them out of building blocks. But we didn’t hit the mark, so we’re retiring Components, and looking to bring some of what we learned there to Underscores.

In the last year, we’ve gotten a lot of questions from the community about Underscores and whether we had abandoned it. No way! It’s a stable project, and we enjoyed working on something new, away from it. It gave us better perspective and more ideas for the future of Underscores.

We also know that involvement from the community is vital. It’s been a while since we added our first contributor external to Automattic. To that end, we’ve given long-time Underscores contributor Ulrich Pogson commit access. He’s also a contributor to WordPress, most frequently as a member of the Theme Review Team. We’re excited to have his expertise and passion for world-class themes as part of the project. Please join me in welcoming Ulrich! 🎉

It’s always hard to let go of a project, in this case, Components. But it shouldn’t be, when you walk away with more knowledge than before. It has us excited and reinvigorated about Underscores and its role in the future of theming. And we’re glad Ulrich will help us along the way!

Introducing Components: A Toolbox for WordPress Theme Development

Meet Components, a starter-theme generator to speed up WordPress theme development.

We love a good starter theme. Since launching Toolbox and its popular successor, Underscores, we’ve always reached for a starter theme when building our next, awesome WordPress theme to get us off on the right foot. With Underscores, we always say it gives you a 1,000-hour start. We get excited when we see someone fork Underscores and make it their own, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re obsessed with evolving what we think of as a starter theme.

Continuing that journey, we’re pleased to announce Components. Think of it as a toolbox for taking your themes where you want them to go, faster. Forked from Underscores, Components gives you a solid base to work from – but it also takes the starter theme to the next level, offering a choice between five different theme types. Each one adds the code needed for starting a certain type of theme. You can select from:

The Classic Blog

  • A two-column layout
  • A sidebar with widgets
  • Navigation in the header
  • A fixed maximum width of 1120px in your style.css file

The Modern Blog

  • A single-column layout
  • A sliding panel for navigation, social menu, and also widgets
  • A large featured image with full-width script

Portfolio

  • A portfolio post type, courtesy of Jetpack, added to all the necessary files
  • A grid portfolio view
  • A single column blog template
  • A sliding panel for navigation, social menu, and also widgets
  • A large featured image with full-width script

Magazine

  • A front page template with featured images in grid a layout, plus a two-column blog
  • Layout with excerpts
  • A two-column layout
  • A sidebar with widgets
  • Navigation in the header
  • A fixed maximum width of 1120px in your style.css file

Business

  • A front-page template with a custom header, testimonials section, and  page content area
  • A custom testimonial post type turned on, courtesy of Jetpack
  • A two-column layout
  • A sidebar with widgets
  • Navigation in the header
  • A fixed maximum width of 1120px in your style.css file

Why Components?

So why the different approach with Components? Three main things inspired this direction: the community behind Underscores, the people who use our themes every day, and the web design and development community.

While maintaining and improving Underscores, we always see great pull requests from the community that we turn away because the contributions end up being too specific for a normal starter theme. Many of those additions would have been perfect in most themes. Now, some of them have a home in a project that zeroes in on a certain kind of user with each theme it builds. Speaking of users, we know from launching hundreds of themes on WordPress.com that themes are one of the most challenging areas of WordPress for people to understand. They need more themes that “just work,” and we hope Components will help achieve that. Lastly, the web community has embraced building systems, methodically created with the pieces that make up a site. Even some popular libraries have taken this approach. We see Components as the first step to allowing you to make a starter theme that’s just right for your project.

We’re very excited to see what the community brings to the project and are looking forward to evolving Components with your help. Right now, we’re in the early stages of our vision and execution for Components, so expect both repositories that power this project, theme-components and components.underscores.me to evolve quickly and constantly.

Fork or download Components on GitHub or generate your own custom starter theme at components.underscores.me and have fun making awesome new WordPress themes!