Best Method to Use for Custom WordPress Theme Development

Need to know your thoughts please on the best method to develop custom WordPress Themes. Please contact me or reply in the comments below!

No way is anyone going to write from scratch, though some still do today.

And building on top of the Twentyseventeen theme seems like an okay idea…

But it doesn’t take long either to set up automated and customizable theme!

Using the Sage Theme from Roots.io

The Sage theme recently turned version 9 after almost a year in its 9-alpha back in 2017.

Now it’s been released as the major version 9 since February 2018.

It looks like it’s about time to move to a more formal approach to managing WordPress theme files.

There are a few new techs working with the Sage theme — again build tools.

There’s Laravel Blade used for PHP templating… because there are ways to write PHP code cleaner.

But if you might not be used to this, it’s alright.

Keep your eyes peeled on the Sage theme going to make Blade templating optional!

New to build tools?

Don’t worry, they were out since 2006…

But didn’t really catch on until 2012 with tech like Grunt, again still completely new to senior developers.

Some stuck to their old ways writing from scratch…

Whilst others adapted to the new technology.

We then got ‘Gulp’, but now there’s ‘Webpack’.

Using the Yeoman.io Generator Called Gulp-Underscores

The ‘gulp-underscores’ generator is a yeoman scaffold. It’s made for implementing the Underscores theme — from Automattic.

You might recognize them.

They’re the company managing WordPress.

So using this Yeoman generator, we now got Underscores with Gulp.

Gulp is a build tool for automated processing of SCSS files.

It’s also got BrowserSync to automatically refresh the site you’ve run Gulp on.

And other useful build tools.

Unfortunately, the Underscores theme currently doesn’t have its own gulp file yet.

So for the meantime, you’ve got to create your own.

There aren’t a lot of installs from this Yeoman generator.

But it seems to be the only one that I could find so far that makes use of the Underscores theme.

Thank you for reading this article!

Have you got a different way of building custom WordPress themes?

Rather than the Sage theme or this specific yeoman generator ‘gulp-underscores’?

Please let me know in the comments below!

Always good to share your method with WordPress custom theme development.

Have a good day!