In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by David A. Kennedy. Kennedy is a Theminator at Automattic and an accessibility advocate. Kennedy joined us to talk about the future of Underscores, a starter theme created by Automattic in 2012. We discussed how Gutenberg may impact theme development in general and some of…
For the past several months we have received inquiries about Automattic’s open source Underscores starter theme. After six months of no commits to the GitHub repository and pull requests left unanswered, users and contributors were beginning to wonder whether the project was abandoned. After contacting Automattic to get a status update on Underscores, the company…
Automattic’s team of theme developers announced the release of Components today along with a suite of themes that extend the popular Underscores starter theme for specific use cases. These include a classic blog, modern blog, portfolio, magazine, and business theme. The new Components website lets theme authors download a theme that includes reusable components tailored…
Some Like it Neat is a new starter theme for WordPress, based on the popular ultra-minimal Underscores theme. It also incorporates Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. On top of that it adds Neat, which applies a semantic grid framework for Sass and Bourbon, enabling you to build any responsive layout that you can…
Denis Bosire has been working with WordPress for more than five years. As client work became more frustrating, he decided to focus his attention on WordPress themes. After an unsuccessful attempt to monetize themes at Creative Market, Bosire decided to try his hand at developing themes for WordPress.org. Nouveau Riche was approved this week and…
The Underscores WordPress starter theme has seen a flurry of activity in recent days, adding support for Sass and automated testing with Travis CI. The theme has been forked more than 1300 times on GitHub with many interesting variations created to support various theme features and frameworks. One fork in particular is getting WordPress theme…
Underscores community project contributors announced today that the theme now includes support for Sass. The popular WordPress starter theme is an open source project maintained by Automattic, and many of its users requested Sass support, according to contributor Tammie Lister. “The community firstly asked for Sass. As Sass is in core, this makes sense. It…
Without much in the way of advertising, Underscores has become a popular choice for WordPress theme developers. To learn more about it, I asked Automattic employee, Konstantin Obenland, @obenland on Twitter, to explain what the theme is, how it got its name, and how people can contribute to the project. Why was Underscores created and…
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…