A solution for designers who don't know Wordpress

http://bckmn.com/naked-wordpress/

by bckmn • 13 years ago

121 44 13 years ago

bckmn.com

papsosouid• 13 years ago

Solution implies there is a problem.

L0j1k4• 13 years ago

Mui elegante, sir.

LordIllidan2• 13 years ago

This could be useful as a starter theme for people who are still learning wordpress. Thanks!

EDIT: I often have to teach other developers the basics of Wordpress - just pointing someone to the Codex sometimes isn't good enough, especially on a tight deadline. This theme can really help out.

And seriously, enough with the negative comments about Wordpress. Love it or hate it, it's there to stay, and it's in our best interests to educate developers how to theme it correctly.

joemaller12• 13 years ago

I was hoping the solution would include something other than WordPress.

joemaller12• 13 years ago

Bones is a similar project based on HTML5 Boilerplate, source is on GitHub: https://github.com/eddiemachado/bones

steveinator• 13 years ago

This is one of the better things to come across Hacker News recently. People will hate on Wordpress all they want, but at the end of the day I still have to support a bunch of clients that use it.

bckmn3• 13 years ago

Thanks, and I completely agree with you about clients.

rquantz2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't think the primary problem with a non-coder working with wordpress would be an inability to look up a function in the docs. Once you've gotten to that point, the actual looking up is trivial. There are a lot of other steps you need to follow first, and knowing how to do them or that they even need to be done would seem to me a greater impediment: setting up a local server, creating a database for the install, getting the wp-config.php file, configuring said file (knowing the database credentials), knowing what a theme is and why you need one, understanding the theme files and hierarchy, being able to read php well enough to understand a functions is even being called, etc.

None of these things are particularly difficult, and they all have good documentation and tutorials, but I would think someone who was resistant to looking up a function signature would probably get bogged down and give up somewhere higher up on the list.

Now, this could still be useful for learners, I just don't know that the target is designers who can't be bothered to learn.

LordIllidan2• 13 years ago

Not sure about the designer part myself, but in the consultation agency where I work, we often do custom themes for clients. Installing wordpress and configuring it is easy enough, even for new developers - but getting them to understand the intricacies of theme development can be a bit tricky.

The themes included with wordpress, twenty-eleven and twenty-twelve can be too complex, and have a lot of cruft we don't need. So we usually start with a skeleton theme, like this one - although this one is a particularly well documented skeleton theme.

Sometimes it takes an example theme like this to make things 'click' for a new developer. For that reason alone, it can be very useful.

rquantz2• 13 years ago

Yes, for a new developer. But for a designer who doesn't have time to learn the codex?

kijin2• 13 years ago

I remember when I first tried to learn the WordPress Codex. It was way more difficult than it had any right to be, not only because of the strange format of WordPress themes (Why would you call a function to start a loop?) but also because WordPress didn't ship with any theme that could serve as a good example.

The default theme was, and still is, too bloated for learners to wrap their heads around. It has too many features, too many branches, and too many sub-templates extending the main template, due to the fact that it also needs to serve as a showcase for all of WordPress's features. I resorted to downloading the most minimalistic third-party theme that I could find, cleaned it up some more, and used it as a base for all the themes I've written since then.

I'm glad that someone finally made an open-source theme specifically for the purpose of being a rock-solid base for other themes. This is something that should have been done by the core developers 10 years ago. I don't know how much longer we'll have to suffer the sprawling spaghetti monster that WordPress is, but since a lot of us are stuck with it anyway, why not make our lives easier for the time being!

P.S. Please add a link to the GitHub repository, too. Some of us prefer git clones to tarballs.

bckmn3• 13 years ago

https://github.com/j-beckman/naked-wordpress

crunchcaptain• 13 years ago

lol... Readme.md is empty!

jwarren4• 13 years ago

The excellent Automattic-published starter theme Underscores [1] has been around for over a year now, and it's precursor, Toolbox [2], has been around since at least mid-2010. Both were designed by the core developers to be open-source bases for other themes, and indeed have been the base for all the official themes for three years now. There are also other base themes like Bones [3] and Roots [4] which are very popular, but are too heavy for my liking.

[1] http://underscores.me/ [2]: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/toolbox [3]: http://themble.com/bones/ [4]: http://www.rootstheme.com/

Also, I'm getting nitpicky here, but you also don't exactly call a function to start a loop. You call a function to fetch the posts in an object. You then use a pretty bog-standard while loop to loop through that object. You do call a method of said post object to determine whether or not the loop should continue - is that considered bad practise generally?

I understand why a lot of people think the WP loop is badly constructed. The start of a typical loop in WP is this:

    if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();

which is essentially shorthand for this:

    if (have_posts()) {
    	while (have_posts()) {
    		the_post();
    	} 
    }

I think the cause for some misgivings is that people might not realised that have_posts() is actually doing this:

    return $wp_query->have_posts();

So you're actually just running a method on the global post object. You'll make similar post objects for custom queries, and interact with them in an identical fashion.

kijin2• 13 years ago

The experience I related above took place around 2008/9. Sorry if that's a bit out of date. I looked through your links and it does look like there have been recent efforts to produce bare-bones themes, though the OP's theme is much better documented. What I really want to see is a version of the Codex that actually guides the user through an exemplary theme, and OP's theme comes pretty close to that.

And yes, I'm referring to the weird `if (have_posts()): while (have_posts()): the_post();` boilerplate. Back then, for a PHP newbie like me, it looked like a magical one-liner ... until I realized that the loop actually terminates hundreds of lines later with an endwhile/endif statement. It's so easy for newbies to miss the significance of the two colons, especially if they're not familiar with the "alternate syntax for control structures".

Although I now understand how the loop works, it still pisses me off that I have to call a function to populate a bunch of hidden variables/objects that are later fetched by other functions. Too much going on behind the scenes == difficult to grok. A simple foreach() loop would have been much more intuitive. Perhaps this will happen sometime soon using the Iterator interface, now that WordPress has finally left PHP 4 behind.

vec2• 13 years ago

The reason that many people think the WP loop is badly constructed is because it entirely works by side effects. A (very simple) WP loop looks like this:

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post() ?>
      <h2><?php the_title() ?></h2>
      <?php the_content() ?>
    <?php endwhile ?>

There are four unique functions there. All of them depend on non-obvious global state and three of them are used specifically to produce side effects. the_post() invisibly overwrites a global and changes an iterator. It not only mutates global state, but it does something different if you accidentally call it twice. And WP's the_whatever() functions echo something and return nothing?! Want to do some filtering on the title before you print it? Better use get_the_whatever() instead. WTF?! Heres how it should work:

    <?php foreach ($post in $wpdb->get_posts() : ?>
      <h2><?= $post->title ?></h2>
      <?= $post->content ?>
    <?php endforeach ?>

sopooneo2• 13 years ago

Why do you need the if? Shouldn't the while loop run zero times if have_posts() returns NULL or an empty array?

dpcan• 13 years ago

AGREED! WordPress should actually have a "Naked" theme as one of the defaults, absolutely. Why a well-commented naked theme isn't part of the default WordPress install has never made sense. I had to make my own with each new version of WordPress so far so when I start a new project from scratch I have a clean slate and an updated empty theme.

noeltock• 13 years ago

There is also http://underscores.me/ which is very well maintained and popular (Github here https://github.com/automattic/_s ).

wmeredith• 13 years ago

This is pretty great. I've been developing on WordPress for 7 years now. Can write my own plugins and functions and the like, but it's all self taught. I'll be giving this a once-over to see if I can learn something (or more likely learn something I already know, but learn it the "right" way). I'm sure I can.

jwarren4• 13 years ago

This is a good, simple theme, at least in PHP terms, and is certainly well commented.

However, I think it heavily falls down in it's ambition of being a good general-purpose starter theme by making some strongly opinionated decisions out of the box. There's far too much grid code in the CSS. It also bizarrely bundles fittext and fitvid, two excellent libraries which have nothing to do with Wordpress.

I would also argue that anyone building a Wordpress theme should be looking things up on the Codex. You don't have to "learn" the Codex any more than you have to "learn" the dictionary. It's there as a reliable and canonical reference, and telling people not to use it will result in bad code and confused developers.

josefresco2• 13 years ago

I never sat down to "learn" the WP Codex either. I began with the most simple and bare-bones WP template there was, and slowly built up on my foundation as I needed the features.

A quick Google search usually brings up the most relevant Codex page and while their code examples aren't always the best, the web usually provides enough user-written tutorials to get my the solution I need.

popopje• 13 years ago

This is cool! but this presentation has one of the worst examples of chrome's windows font rendering issues i've seen.. chrome: http://i.imgur.com/DT6qDKg.jpg ff: http://i.imgur.com/bUG6sxi.jpg

restlessdesign• 13 years ago

If your job is to make Wordpress websites and you don't know how to make Wordpress websites, then you should not be making Wordpress websites.

svmegatron• 13 years ago

On the other hand: if your job is to make websites, and the client wants a wordpress website, then you make a wordpress website. IMO the "design a website" requirement is the creative challenge, not the "slice into files for wordpress" part.

Of course, that could just be the bias of my own skillset talking.

wikwocket• 13 years ago

This isn't aimed at people whose job it is to write Wordpress themes. It's aimed at people who want to learn to write Wordpress themes, for fun or profit.

No need to hate on new, useful teaching aids. Everyone needs to start somewhere!

josefresco2• 13 years ago

Fixed it: If your desire is to have a job making Wordpress websites and you don't know how to make Wordpress websites, then you should be making Wordpress websites.

ParadisoShlee• 13 years ago

Don't know wordpress? lucky bastards.

L0j1k4• 13 years ago

Tell your client you don't work with WP unless they sign forms indemnifying you in the event their site gets owned and everything they have stored electronically stolen. Which will happen eventually, because WordPress. When I explain this to clients, they become open to other solutions that don't involve WP. To me, WP is like jQuery: A useful tool in the right situation, but far too often used because a developer is either lazy or lacking the technical skill to use something more appropriate.

Now let's see how quickly this gets downvoted into oblivion because WP.

pknight2• 13 years ago

A little dramatic? I don't think you do your clients any favors by scaring them with nonsense. What alternatives do you typically push? Are they better because they are more to your taste, or are they better for your clients?

jqueryin• 13 years ago

I do believe this approach to commenting a basic theme could drastically help Wordpress theming beginners. I would go one step further, however, and also try to add links back to the documentation for the function calls, hooks, filters, etc.

For those interested, this would add a significant amount of reading material so they could have a better understanding.

bckmn3• 13 years ago

True. It had occurred to me, but I thought it might gum up the readability quite a bit with URLs in the comments. Probably a good idea, though.

iamben• 13 years ago

Looking forward to having a proper look at this.

I mostly use Starkers as a totally bare bones template starting point. If anyone is interested: http://viewportindustries.com/products/starkers/

jcomis• 13 years ago

Starkers is good for barebones, but I don't think it's filling the same void as this theme.

backwardm• 13 years ago

I appreciate you making this and have downloaded a copy to learn from. While I usually develop websites using Rails, more and more of my clients are asking about WordPress. I cringe a little each time (yes, I'm one of the ones who would rather not build sites with WordPress), but at the end of the day, I am in the business of helping clients get their stuff done online—if that means doing it with WordPress, then I'll dig in and get it done. To that end, this will be a helpful resource for me. Thanks.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

"many designers don’t have the time to learn the WordPress Codex. It’s huge. It’s intimidating. It’s confusing." — maybe it's just because I know Wordpress quite well, but the documentation I found when learning years ago (it's even better now) wasn't difficult at all. The Wordpress community is so big that you can Google solutions to most problems, find solutions and learn at the same time.

Of course being a designer and not a developer, you're going to struggle learning syntax and convention (that goes for any language or application like Wordpress). Stick with it, the Codex is great.

It's true the Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven default Wordpress themes were bloated and if you were trying to use them as a base or learn, you'd probably be overwhelmed by the kitchen sink approach the core team took when creating those themes. Having said that, if you want a clean starting base for a theme, try using the bundled Twenty Twelve: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/twentytwelve — which is arguably the best default theme ever to grace Wordpress. Most naked themes you encounter for Wordpress aren't naked at all (Bones especially abstracting an already abstracted CMS even more).

Having said that, this naked theme looks good. It's actually naked and well commented but not naked to the point it's really any less simple than Twenty Twelve (just less files). The benefit of considering a default theme as a starting base is that you get to see how the experts develop a Wordpress theme and the added bonus of how to use the custom background functionality and the Theme Customization API as well.

This kind of reminds me of my Actual Barebones HTML5 Github: https://github.com/Vheissu/Actually-Barebones-HTML5-Template — It's literally a HTML file that gives you a HTML5 structure without assuming you want jQuery or anything of the sorts. The term naked and barebones seems to have lost a lot of meaning in the web world.

ahmd• 13 years ago

good job,

I just realised the theme is under GNU General Public License, does this means I have to share my modifications to the theme?, what if i want to build on it and sell it?

thanks

A solution for designers who don't know Wordpress

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