Roots for ProcessWire

[Jonathan Lahijani]

If you've done heavy frontend WordPress development, then you may have heard of Roots:

http://roots.io/

Roots 7.0.0 on Github:

https://github.com/roots/roots/tree/7.0.0

It's described as:

Roots, a WordPress starter theme, helps you make better themes with HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, and Grunt.

Some key points from their site:

• Optimized for production use - The Roots Gruntfile compiles your LESS & minifies and concatenates CSS and JS.
• Bootstrap ready - Roots includes Bootstrap for faster web development, but it can easily be removed or replaced with your preferred CSS framework.
• Write less code with the theme wrapper - Template markup is controlled by a theme wrapper and is handled by one file instead of being scattered across all template files like typical themes.

It's a starter theme (not a theme with an existing design) for tech savy developers and comes pre-configured with a nice set of tools, build scripts (css and js minification, etc) and an excellent template architecture and file organization from which you can build a site.  How everything is organized is what makes it shine (as well as how it fixes a lot of ugly things in WordPress).

I've been using it as my go to starter theme for over a year and I like the way it's been thought out.  I recently used it on a large corporate site with some strict production environment requirements and it allowed me to dive very deep into Roots and get a great understanding of it.

With that being said, I still have yet to settle on a standard site profile for when I create ProcessWire-based websites.  I figured since I like Roots so much, I could create a site profile based off of it, if not for the template structure, then mainly for the tools it provides as well as file organization.

I spent a couple hours and got a lot completed already.

Anyone else have experience with Roots?

Jonathan

[onjegolders]

Hi Jonathan,

I might be wrong but I'm thinking that the main reason this is so useful is that with Wordpress there are so many obstacles to overcome and this helps reset them in some way.

With ProcessWire basically being a blank canvas I suppose the need is less great?

That said, there are sure to be things here that can help speed up any site's development.