Just another WordPress theme.

WordPress Boilerplate

Boilerplate is a battle-tested WordPress parent theme built from over 10 years of real-world production use across dozens of websites, including marketing sites, ecommerce builds, subscription platforms, blogs, and custom business websites. It combines classic WordPress theme architecture with a modern Bootstrap 5, SASS, and Vite workflow, giving developers a clean foundation without sacrificing the flexibility that makes WordPress powerful. The result is a fast, configurable, accessible, and highly extensible theme system designed to launch polished websites quickly while still supporting deep customization when a project demands it.

Features

  • Bootstrap 5 WordPress boilerplate built for sane parent/child theme development
  • Light/dark color modes with OS preference support and menu-link overrides
  • Configuration-driven theme architecture powered by config.php, SASS variables, CSS custom properties, and Vite build config
  • Vanilla PHP templates that respect WordPress theme best practices
  • Responsive layout system with fly-out sidebars, sticky navigation, and rhythm-based spacing
  • Modern Vite build system with development/production builds, sourcemaps, minification, and filesize reporting
  • Editor parity for front-end, block editor, and WP admin typography/color consistency

Responsive

  • Off-Canvas Responsive Asides:
    left and right sidebars transform into fixed, fly-out mobile menus with CSS-driven checkbox toggles and backdrop blur overlays
  • Smart Sticky Navbar:
    hides the navbar when scrolling down to maximize screen real estate, reveals it instantly on scroll-up, and compensates for the fixed WP Admin bar
  • Bootstrap 5 Integration:
    complimentary to WordPress/PHP, MPA-compliant, and designed around traditional multi-page WordPress theme rendering
  • Vertical Rhythm System:
    uses a custom CSS --baseline variable and SASS ru() function to maintain strict typographic rhythm that scales responsively across breakpoints
  • Responsive Typography:
    font sizing, spacing, headings, and layout rhythm are tuned through SASS variables instead of one-off component overrides

Theme Features

  • Light/dark modes that respect OS preferences and can be overridden by custom menu links
    • #bp-color-mode-toggle
    • #bp-color-mode-toggle-with-text
  • Configuration-driven theming:
    PHP-side feature flags and theme behavior are centralized in config.php, while SASS variables and CSS custom properties drive runtime layout/color behavior
  • SASS-driven design system with configuration-driven layout, typography, borders, forms, buttons, link states, and light/dark theme tokens
  • Parent/child theme architecture:
    child themes can extend or override parent theme behavior while preserving a stable parent baseline
  • Custom BS5 Navwalker:
    fully implements Bootstrap 5 navigation with multi-level dropdowns, dividers, headers, and screen-reader accessibility classes from the WP Menu editor
  • Editor Parity:
    injects specific stylesheets (editor.scss, admin.scss) into the block editor and WP admin to keep typography and colors aligned with the front-end experience

WordPress Features

  • Vanilla PHP templates which respect WordPress theme best practices
    • Full category/archive/search support
    • Full widget support
    • Block/classic editor support
  • Dynamic Breadcrumbs:
    highly configurable breadcrumb system that natively handles custom post types, hierarchical pages, categories, tags, and pagination depths
  • Search Enhancements:
    implements a minimum character limit, defaulting to 3, to prevent empty queries from returning all site content, and adds Post Type badges to search results
  • Smart Excerpts:
    custom excerpt generator that intelligently strips Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes, replacing block-level HTML tags with spaces to prevent words from mashing together
  • Inline Reply Forms:
    JavaScript intercepts the “Reply” button to dynamically clone and inject the comment form directly under the targeted comment without reloading the page
  • Theme Action Hooks:
    templates expose extension points so child themes can customize behavior without rewriting core parent templates

Media & Content

  • Fancybox Lightbox:
    modern lightbox and gallery support for WordPress galleries, image blocks, and explicit lightbox links
  • Gallery Captions:
    captions are pulled from figure markup, image metadata, titles, or alt text when available
  • Intersection Observer Lazy Loading:
    native lazy loading for images with .lazy classes, falling back to a throttled scroll listener for older browsers
  • Dedicated Print Stylesheet:
    print.scss hides navbars, sidebars, and comments, switches text to high-contrast black, and prints hyperlink href values next to links

Accessibility

  • Screen-Reader Optimization:
    extensive use of aria-expanded, aria-hidden, and .visually-hidden classes across toggles, pagination, nav, and forms
  • Keyboard-Friendly Navigation:
    Bootstrap 5 navigation patterns, visible link states, and accessible menu controls are preserved across light and dark themes
  • Translation-Ready Output:
    template strings and escaped output follow WordPress theme conventions

Optimizations

  • Performance & Bloat Removal:
    automatically disables WP emojis, oEmbed auto-discovery scripts, and REST API header links to keep the front-end clean
  • Minified/Tersed Assets:
    production builds generate optimized JS and CSS assets for front-end delivery
  • Self-Hosted Font Assets:
    Bootstrap Icons and Open Sans are copied into stable theme-controlled output paths
  • Stable Asset Contract:
    compiled assets are emitted to predictable WordPress paths such as dist/js/theme.js, dist/css/theme.css, and dist/font/...

Build System

  • Modern Vite build system
    • Watch capable via npm run watch
    • Working JS and CSS source maps
    • Development and production builds
    • Filesize reporting, with accurate gzip expected sizes
    • vite.plugin.sass_sourcemap.mjs handles SASS-to-CSS sourcemap generation and passes it correctly through PostCSS/Autoprefixer
  • PostCSS/Autoprefixer Support:
    compiled CSS is processed for practical browser compatibility
  • Build Configuration Separation:
    PHP theme behavior lives in config.php, while build targets and asset behavior are organized through the Vite/build configuration layer
  • Validation-Friendly Workflow:
    supports PHP linting, JS syntax checks, production build validation, and filesize reporting before commits
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