About the Author

Ben Word

Ben Word has been creating WordPress sites since 2004. He loves dogs, climbing, and yoga, and is passionate about helping people build awesome things on the web.

Bedrock 1.12.5 Released

May 14, 2019

Bedrock 1.12.5 has been released with support for disabling the built-in fatal error handler on development introduced in WordPress 5.2.

Bedrock 1.12.3 and Trellis 1.0.2 Released

March 13, 2019

Bedrock has been updated with WordPress 5.1.1, a security and maintenance release. Trellis 1.0.2 includes a few minor changes.

Sync Script

February 22, 2019

Sync your WordPress database and media library between environments with WP-CLI aliases and rsync.

Bedrock 1.12.2 and WordPress 5.1 Released

February 21, 2019

Bedrock 1.12.2 has been released with support for WordPress 5.1. WordPress 5.1 includes performance improvements to the new editor and more.

Sage 9.0.9 Released

February 13, 2019

Sage 9.0.9 has been released with Bootstrap 4.3.1 support which patches an XSS vulnerability.

Sage 9.0.8 Released

February 11, 2019

Sage 9.0.8 has been released with Bootstrap 4.3.0 support and a few other minor updates.

Bedrock 1.12.0 Released

February 7, 2019

Bedrock 1.12.0 has been released with a couple new features and support for the latest version of vlucas/phpdotenv.

Using Trellis to Provision and Deploy to DigitalOcean Droplets

January 7, 2019

DigitalOcean can be easily used with Trellis, and WordPress sites hosted on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet can handle quite a bit with Trellis and FastCGI caching.

Automate WordPress and Plugin Updates with Composer

December 13, 2018

How to use Dependencies.io to automate WordPress and WordPress plugin updates with Composer. Save yourself some time — especially if you're an agency or freelancer who manages multiple sites.

Deploying to Kinsta with Trellis

November 23, 2018

Learn how to deploy your Bedrock and Trellis-based WordPress sites to Kinsta, a managed WordPress host that has Composer and WP-CLI support.

Using DigitalOcean’s Block Storage with Trellis

October 17, 2018

Favorite WordPress Plugins and Utilities

October 16, 2018

A list of some of the most commonly used WordPress plugins and WordPress utilities/Composer packages from the Roots Community.

Free Migrations from WP Engine and Flywheel to Kinsta

October 9, 2018

Through March 31st, Kinsta is offering free migrations from WP Engine, Flywheel, and StudioPress. Kinsta is the only managed WordPress host we've ever felt comfortable recommending.

How to Use Lozad.js in Sage

April 24, 2018

How to use Lozad.js in Sage.

Backing Up Trellis Sites to an S3 Bucket

April 12, 2018

How to back up Trellis-based WordPress sites to an S3 bucket with aws-cli and a script running on a cron job.

Laravel Valet and Bedrock Multisite

April 8, 2018

How to setup Laravel Valet and a Bedrock-based WordPress multisite installation.

Remove Theme Source Files on Deploy

April 8, 2018

Remove your theme source files on a Trellis deploy to prevent them from being accessed on the web.

Thanks to Our Recent Sponsors: Kinsta, KM Digital, Harness Software

February 21, 2018

Recently we've started using OpenCollective to get financial support from the community. Today, we're welcoming some larger sponsors: Kinsta, KM, Harness

Favorite WP-CLI Packages: Login Command

February 9, 2018

wp-cli-login-command is a package by Evan Mattson that creates passwordless links for your WordPress sites. It's as simple as: wp login create username ✨

Sage 9

February 7, 2018

Just like Bootstrap 4’s recent final release 🎉, Sage 9 is finally out of beta after years of development!

Theme Development with Sage

February 7, 2018

Theme Development with Sage is a book on building well organized & easily maintained WordPress themes using a modern web development workflow.

How to Style Gravity Forms with Bootstrap 4

April 20, 2017

How to style Gravity Forms with Bootstrap 4 by using @extend in your Sass stylesheets.

Using and Customizing WordPress Starter Content

December 13, 2016

Starter content allows themes to define suggested settings, pages, widgets, and menus on new WordPress installations. New feature as of WordPress 4.7.

WordPress Local Development on macOS with Valet and Bedrock

August 29, 2016

Use Laravel's Valet project to setup a local WordPress development environment with Bedrock in minutes. Valet uses Nginx, PHP 7, along with MariaDB.

We’ve Migrated from Yoast SEO

May 10, 2016

After putting it off for months, we've finally migrated from using the Yoast SEO plugin to both the The SEO Framework and Google XML Sitemaps plugins.

Soil

March 7, 2016

Soil is a WordPress plugin which contains a collection of modules for front-end modifications. Cleaner WordPress markup and more.

Disable PHP 7 Deprecated Notices from WordPress Plugins

February 17, 2016

If you’re running PHP 7 then you’ve probably ran into issues with deprecated notices from various WordPress plugins. See how to disable these errors.

2015 Recap

December 28, 2015

2015 was a really big year for Roots with the releases of Sage and Trellis. Our vision is to provide a suite of tools to make WordPress development better.

Sage 8.3.0 Updates

October 13, 2015

Sage 8.3.0 introduces setup.php (config.php and init.php combined) and removes the search template, Modernizr, and the ConditionalTagCheck class.

Where MAMP and VVV Fall Short

August 12, 2015

Trellis uses Ansible, and we’re serious about development and production parity. Match your staging/production servers to your development VM.

Why Do We Use These Tools?

August 10, 2015

We use other projects to help make development easier when working on WordPress sites. We stand on the shoulders of giants and let you stand on ours.

Sage 8.2.0 and Soil 3.4.0 Updates

April 29, 2015

Sage 8.2.0 now uses Bootstrap Sass. The nav walker and jQuery CDN features have been moved to Soil. Bootstrap gallery component has also been removed.

A Modern WordPress Example

April 23, 2015

We've created a new GitHub repository called roots-example-project.com to show a live, working example of how to use Roots projects together.

We’ve Migrated from Gumroad to Easy Digital Downloads

April 9, 2015

We're now selling our products on Easy Dgital Downloads directly from this site instead of on Gumroad. Purchases are processed through Stripe.

Sage 8.1.0 and Soil 3.1.0 Updates

March 13, 2015

We’ve moved HTML5 Boilerplate’s Google Analytics out of Sage and turned it into a Soil module. Soil now has a module for moving all JS to the footer.

New Website, Sage, and the Future

February 25, 2015

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.

Theme Development with Gulp and Bower

February 23, 2015

Learn how to use Gulp and Bower in Sage for WordPress theme development. See BrowserSync in action, learn how to add third-party packages and more.

Roots Share Buttons

January 22, 2015

A WordPress plugin for lightweight social sharing buttons. Mobile-first stylesheet and no external JS dependencies. Supports custom share button templates.

Roots 7.0.0 Updates

July 3, 2014

Roots 7.0.0 introduces a leaner Roots, Bower for front-end package management, updated LESS files organization, a Grunt workflow, and more.

Switch Between Environments from the WordPress Admin Bar

January 13, 2014

The WordPress Stage Switcher plugin allows you to easily switch between environments from the WordPress admin bar.

2013 Recap

December 30, 2013

2013 was a big year for Roots with 7 releases for the starter theme, a new website, GitHub organization, and more!