Ben Word

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

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

If you’re running PHP 7 then you’ve probably ran into issues with deprecated notices from various WordPress plugins. Trellis was recently upgraded with PHP 7 support so unfortunately we’ve seen a lot of these notices. If it was your own code, you’d want to fix these deprecations. But since we’re dealing with plugins, that’s not … Continued

HTTPS should be enabled everywhere by default. Google has been pushing for HTTPS everywhere for a while, and even uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. Trellis scores an A+ on the Qualys SSL Labs Test when used with a solid SSL certificate. Have a solid certificate The first step of having a proper SSL setup … Continued

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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 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