Favorite WordPress Plugins and Utilities
I asked Brandon Nifong, Mike Spainhower, Craig, Evan Mattson, Nathan Knowler, and Matt Mirus for their recommendations on WordPress plugins and any relevant Composer packages they use on their sites. Here’s what our list of most frequently used WordPress plugins looks like! Free WordPress plugins Better Search Replace for performing a search/replace on the database … Continued
Free Migrations from WP Engine and Flywheel to Kinsta
Through October 31st, Kinsta is offering free migrations from WP Engine, Flywheel, and StudioPress. The free migration does not cover setting up a Bedrock site, and ⚠️ Bedrock is only supported on the Business 1 and up plans, but if you’re already using WP Engine, Flywheel, or StudioPress, then now is a perfect time to … Continued
How to Use Lozad.js in Sage
Backing Up Trellis Sites to an S3 Bucket
Laravel Valet and Bedrock Multisite
Remove Theme Source Files on Deploy
Thanks to Our Recent Sponsors: Kinsta, KM Digital, Harness Software
Recently we’ve started using OpenCollective to accept backers for Roots and get financial support from the community. We already have a lot of individual backers, and today, we’re welcoming some larger sponsors. We’re thrilled to announce that Kinsta is now a full Roots sponsor and is backing both Sage and Trellis at the gold levels! … Continued
Favorite WP-CLI Packages: Login Command
This is the first post in a series on WP-CLI Packages. Most work days for me involve working on WordPress sites, which in-turn means that I’m regularly interacting with WP installs via WP-CLI. 💻 wp is the 4th most used command in my history, and wp login is one of my most frequently used commands. … Continued
Sage 9
Just like Bootstrap 4’s recent final release 🎉, Sage 9 is finally out of beta after years of development! Thank you to everyone who helped contribute to Sage 9 by using it and reporting issues, contributing code, helping others out in the community, and for sticking around while we worked towards this release. 💚 The … Continued
Theme Development with Sage
How to Style Gravity Forms with Bootstrap 4
Using and Customizing WordPress Starter Content
Starter content allows themes to define suggested settings, pages, widgets, and menus on new WordPress installations. You can customize the starter content in order to best suit your theme. Introduced with the release of WordPress 4.7, the best example that exists right now is in Twenty Seventeen’s codebase. From a new WordPress 4.7+ installation, enter … Continued
WordPress Local Development on macOS with Valet and Bedrock
We’ve Migrated from Yoast SEO
We’re no longer running the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin on this site. We’d kept our Yoast SEO installation version at v2.3.5 and held off on updating the plugin after v3.0 was released at the end of November 2015. The large amount of bug reports and complaints since v3.0 were a big concern. Even with the … Continued
Soil
Stage Switcher
Disable PHP 7 Deprecated Notices from WordPress Plugins
2015 Recap
2015 was a really big year for Roots. It was the first year that we really executed on our vision of providing a suite of modern tools to make WordPress development easier and better. This was achieved with two major changes: releasing Sage and Trellis. The first half of 2015 was extremely busy with re-branding, … Continued
Sage 8.3.0 Updates
Sage is losing weight! The lib/ folder is down to 5 files. There were mostly minor changes in this release, including: config.php and init.php have been combined into setup.php Search template has been removed Modernizr has been removed The ConditionalTagCheck class has been removed Take a look at the Sage 8.3.0 release on GitHub for … Continued
Where MAMP and VVV Fall Short
Most people in the WordPress world probably get started off with MAMP or WAMP. The issue with that is that they can be extremely brittle, for one thing. You’re also tied to the versions of the software that MAMP pre-includes. They might upgrade to newer versions, such as PHP 5.6, but the problem is that … Continued
Why Do We Use These Tools?
If you think you don’t need tools like gulp and Composer, think again. Embrace them and you will be become better at your job. Last week I came across a thread in the Advanced WordPress group about Roots and Sage. One of the commenters said: That was exactly what drove me away from Roots, you … Continued
Sage 8.2.0 and Soil 3.4.0 Updates
New updates have been made to both Sage and Soil. Sage is now using Sass Bootstrap as the default. Bootstrap 4 is going to be Sass. There’s not an ETA on a release, but it’s been in development for almost a year, so hopefully we’ll see an alpha soon There’s not really a big difference. … Continued
A Modern WordPress Example
Roots now has quite a few projects, and as we’re constantly improving them, it can be difficult to understand how to configure and get them all working together. As much as we try to provide documentation and support, the easiest way to learn is still to see a working example and some code in action. … Continued
We’ve Migrated from Gumroad to Easy Digital Downloads
When we began selling products on roots.io in the summer of 2013, we went with Gumroad since it was really easy to implement and had a great user buying experience. Gumroad is the perfect tool if you’re selling a single product by a single seller. In our case, we weren’t just selling products as "Roots". … Continued
Sage 8.1.0 and Soil 3.1.0 Updates
New updates have been made to both Sage and Soil. The changelog is small and mostly minor for both projects. We’ve moved HTML5 Boilerplate’s Google Analytics snippet out of Sage and turned it into a Soil module. The option for adding a Google Analytics ID still exists in the theme config (lib/config.php) and the theme … Continued
New Website, Sage, and the Future
This is the 5th major update to the site since 2011. We’ve updated the design, re-branded the starter theme, and released a big update with version 8.0.0. Re-introducing the starter theme as Sage The Roots starter theme is now known as Sage. Ever since we launched Bedrock, things got a little weird with branding since … Continued
Theme Development with Gulp and Bower
Cleaner WordPress Markup with Soil
Soil is a WordPress plugin that cleans up WordPress markup along with a few other enhancements. Code is poetry? The biggest component of Soil is the ‘clean up’, which stems from me being a little OCD with code formatting. Soil’s clean up makes the output of WordPress markup as minimal as possible, mostly by using … Continued
Roots Share Buttons
Roots 7.0.0 Updates
Roots 7.0.0 was released today! The new release features a much improved theme development workflow. Development started back in Feburary and, after a lot of feedback and help from the Roots community, is finally ready. This new version introduces Bower for front-end package management, better LESS organization, and a new Grunt workflow. What's new Leaner … Continued
Switch Between Environments from the WordPress Admin Bar
We've released a WordPress Stage Switcher plugin that will allow you to easily switch between environments from the WordPress admin bar: You'll need to have ENVIRONMENTS and WP_ENV defined in your WordPress config to use the stage switcher. The ENVIRONMENTS constant must be a serialized array of 'environment' => 'url' elements: $envs = array( ‘development’ … Continued
2013 Recap
2013 was a big year for Roots. Here's a rundown: Released 7 new versions of the Roots Theme Integrated Grunt into the master branch to better automate theme development Updated to Bootstrap 3 as soon as it was released Added LESS source maps support Moved from Google Groups to Discourse for our discussion forum Acquired … Continued
Colin OBrien