WP Rig – A WordPress Starter Theme and Build Process in One

Morten Rand-Hendricksen, Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning, has released WP Rig. WP Rig is a WordPress starter theme and build process combined into one. The starter theme provides a minimal set of templates with the ability to drag-and-drop files from the WordPress template hierarchy.

It contains a heavily optimized code and file structure, support for lazy-loading images, and documented helper functions. The build process requires no configuration and provides a modern foundation to develop on top of.

Although WP Rig ships with a starter theme, the build process works with any theme you choose to use. WP Rig uses Gulp to manage and optimize files, BrowserSync to immediately preview from inside the browser, and ES2015 to parse JavaScript. Babel, PostCSS, and CSSNext is used to parse CSS. The WordPress Coding Standards and ESLint are used to check code quality.

VS Code is tightly integrated with WP Rig but developers can use any code editor they choose.

Rand-Hendriksen says the goal of the project is to provide a starting point where developers can write accessible and performant code from the start using best practices.

“WordPress and the web it lives on has evolved,” he said. “So have the tools we use to build experiences and interactions on and with the web. WordPress theme development is no longer ‘just’ about writing PHP and CSS and JavaScript.

“It’s also about accessibility and build processes and coding standards and performance best practices and and modern coding languages and browser support and a myriad of other topics.

“WP Rig bridges this gap by building accessibility, performance, coding standards, and modern coding best practices in by default.”

LinkedIn Learning donated Rand-Hendriksen’s time to WP Rig. In collaboration with XWP, Google, and other members of the WordPress community, it was released as an open source project that is maintained by him and Rachel Cherry.

“It is not owned or branded by any company, nor beholden to a company goal or ideology,” he said. “The purpose and goal of WP Rig is to provide the WordPress community with a theme development rig that puts accessibility, performance, and modern best practices in the front seat to the benefit of the end-user and the web as a whole.”

You can download WP Rig for free from the project’s site or on GitHub. To learn how to use it, LinkedIn Learning is offering a free course entitled “Build WordPress Themes with WP Rig.” The course covers a myriad of topics including, configuring the VS Code workpace settings, Templates, and AMP integration.

For more information about WP Rig check out the project’s official announcement.