Underscores for EDD: A Free Starter Theme for Easy Digital Downloads

Over the past two years, Easy Digital Downloads has become a dominant player among WordPress plugins for selling digital products. EDD has been downloaded nearly 300,000 times due to its developer-friendly codebase and comprehensive set of features tailored to digital stores.

While there are several dozen EDD-ready themes available, many developers prefer to build their own in order to create a unique design and incorporate custom features. Underscores for EDD is a free starter theme that makes it easy to develop EDD themes.

Created by WordPress developer Sean Davis, the theme incorporates EDD-specific templates into Automattic’s Underscores theme to lay a styleless foundation for your digital store. “Every time I build a WordPress theme with _s and integrate it with EDD, I do a couple of hours of dirty work,” Davis said. “No more. All the dirty work is done here in this starter theme.”

Underscores for EDD takes care of several time-intensive aspects of building a custom theme, including page templates for all the default EDD pages and a members area template. The theme has a grid-ready storefront template for digital downloads, which is a common layout for EDD stores.

Davis has written in several theme customizer options for manipulating EDD-specific output in addition to regular blog settings. This makes it easy to customize basic settings for your storefront.

Underscores for EDD also includes a sidebar for download pages with download information at the top, a full _s CSS reset, basic responsive styles and support for Font Awesome icons.

This theme gives you a big head start when developing for Easy Digital Downloads, especially if you’re just getting started creating custom storefronts. It includes all the templates you need so that the only thing left to do is add your CSS. For more screenshots and instructions on using Underscores for EDD, check out the theme’s homepage and download it from Github.