Design your way

Back in the days, WordPress boilerplates were created to let developers create plugins and make maximal use of their website building potential.

What was just an idea at the time grew up to be a huge, open-source community project that helps developers make WordPress even more powerful than it is.

The complexity of how apps and websites are built nowadays can’t possibly compare to how they were created just a decade ago.

Technology hit the long mile since the 90’s when websites were created manually, layouts were entirely table-based, and JavaScript was ugly enough to make cute animations impossible.

Things are different today, as we have technology, languages, and frameworks working in synergy to build beautiful web units, the biggest achievement being their universal application on different browsers and devices. That makes developers work more challenging, but also far more interesting than before.

Why is it so cool to be a developer?

First and foremost, you’re overwhelmed by proficient technologies that are innovating as we speak and always have the chance to try something other than leading tools and toolkits.

Boilerplates, for instance, are at the very core of this rapid development, giving developers possibilities they never thought they’d have.

In case you’re not familiar with them, boilerplates are the foundational codes that allow developers to launch and execute projects without writing codes from scratch.

Most of the time, boilerplates come with universally applicable components that are easy to customize and therefore work for any type of app or website.

Of course, not every boilerplate out there is simple and hassle-free, but most good ones actually are.

The market’s leaders, for instance, focus on what they were really designed for – scaffolding and tweaking of existent codes, algorithms, and functions to make those work for your project.

One of the biggest benefits of the appearance of boilerplates is designing WordPress and its widgets.

_s

_s., or underscores as it is also known, is a hacking theme you shouldn’t apply in the role of a Parent Theme. Instead, you should turn it into a WordPress theme by choice, and use its very minimal CSS to simplify your development process.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was created using Coding Standards, Documentation Standards, and Plugin APIs.

The tool documents all functions, classes, and variables to let you know what needs to be edited at any point in time.

The tool organizes files in a very strict scheme, reminiscent of WordPress’s Plugin Repository. The Boilerplate also provides a .pot file, which you can use if you decide to internationalize your website.

Bedrock

Bedrock has some of the best file-and-folder structures in the industry. The Boilerplate uses Composer to manage dependency.

It provides you with many environment-specific files to make WP configuration a bit easier.It combines environment variables with Dotenv

It allows you to use your standard plugins as mu-plugins, due to the presence of an Autoloader. It uses wp-password-bcrypt and separate web root passwords to secure your data

With Trellis, you will have few extra features at your disposal:

An easy, Vagrant-powered development environment
An even easier Ansible-powered server provisioning (MariaDB, PHP 7.1, Ubuntu 16.04)
Single-command deployment

WordPress Widget Boilerplate

Here comes another ready-to-activate WP widget boilerplate you get to use immediately. This is how:

Copy the entire widget-boilerplate directory, and then paste it directly to your wp-content/plugins directory
Locate the ‘Plugins’ tab on the main dashboard page
Look for an item in the menu called ‘TODO’
Activate it

This will be enough to have your WP Widget Boilerplate active and running. You should have in mind that the tool offers no real functionality, and thus won’t add/remove anything from your WP site. What it will demonstrate instead is how different widgets behave when being worked with.

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is Paul Irish and Divya Manian’s flagship HTML product, which aims to help developers save extra time and apply HTML5 on their WP websites. Please note that Paul Irish approves of his boilerplate being referred to under this name.

The HTML5 Boilerplate layout was developed relying on concepts laid out in ‘Designing a Blog with HTML 5’ by Bruce Lawson.

Still, the framework doesn’t only use DIVs to create content layouts, but also works with brand new HTML5 tags such as nav, articles, sections, headers, or footers.

As you will see for yourself, the layout is quite bare, and comes only with basic boilerplate styles required for WordPress. The methods it puts in place, however, can easily be applied for other themes as well.

Wordplate

Wordplate is only available to PHP 7.0+ users who have this version installed on their machines. They may also need NPMinstalled and Node.js, in case they want to complement their JavaScript or CSS work with Laravel Mix.

These are the basic requirements for your server.

Support for PHP 7.0 and newer
Mbstring PHP extensions

Locate the ‘Composer’ command for creating projects in the terminal, and use it to install WordPress. This is how it looks:

$ composer create-project wordplate/wordplate

WPGulp

How will WPGulp help you?

It will use BrowserSync to provide live reloads for your browser.
It works with CSS, and ensures access to Sass to CSS conversions, CSS minification, error catching, Sourcemaps, Autoprefixing, and merging media queries.
It works with JS: It can be used to uglify and concatenate Custom and Vendor JS files
It minifies images in different formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG ones).
It monitors all changes of CSS and JS files
It monitors all changes in PHP files
It corrects automatically corrupted line endings
It substitutes browser page reloads with InjectCSS
It generates .pot files for i18n and l10n

WordPress Plugin Skeleton

A clear and well-organized interface
Adhering to object-centred design principles
Implementing Model-View-Controller patterns
A render_template() that wraps rendering file views, and makes it possible for other themes and plugins to modify and override views.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Powered

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Powered is an all-on-one development environment for WordPress plugins.

First, the boilerplate package invites you to select a snippet and a library and then provides you with ready-to-use samples where a minimal copy-paste work will suffice to build a functional plugin. These are the features you will be able to use:

An integrated library

Compass and Grunt for full Sass support
CoffeeScript support for Grunt (it may lack for those working with Yeoman generators)
Custom folders to arrange your Composer libraries
Code generators for beginners
A large number of starter-code and composer.json libraries (depending on the Yeoman generator you’ve chosen):
o WPBP/PointerPlus

o WPBP/CronPlus

o WPBP/Widgets-Helper

o WPBP/FakePage

o WPBP/Template

o WPBP/Debug

o WPBP/CPT_Columns

o WPBP/Requirements

o WPBP/Language

o WebDevStudios/CMB2

o voceconnect/wp-contextual-help

o nathanielks/wp-admin-notice

o origgami/CMB2-grid

o WebDevStudios/CPT_Core

o WebDevStudios/Taxonomy_Core

o Freemius/wordpress-sdk

o julien731/WP-Dismissible-Notices-Handler

o julien731/WP-Review-Me

o wpackagist-plugin/posts-to-posts

o athlan/custom-fields-permalink-plugin

o wpbp/backbone-modal-view

o yoast/i18n-module

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generator

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate Generators is a small Node.js application used to create custom zip files, and based on Tom McFarlin’s (wppb.io) WPPB.

The app works in the following way: it locates the plugin in question, and replaces its name, author data, and original code. Then, it prepares a zip file with new, ready-to use codes.

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is a simple bootstrap tool developed by Tom McFarlin that uses Compass, Grunt, SVN, and GIT to develop WP plugins. For instance, you can develop plugins within your own GIT repository, or use WP’s plugin database as an environment for production. The tool also makes it possible to run Grunt commands that deploy its newest versions.

WordPress Plugin Starter Kit

This is another no-brainer boilerplate for WP users which offers an array of interesting features. You will get:

Painless installation and onboarding
An object-oriented code that is clean and easy to command
A database of WP developers’ best practices
A modern npm and Gulp workflow
A variety of useful modules

These are the modules that will be included:

CRUD (crate, read, update and delete) empowered custom database tables
Custom post types and taxonomies Taxonomies
AJAX
TinyMCE plugin shortcodes
Plugin Settings page with numerous tabs

WPCustomize

WPCustomize is an easy-to-install WP theme that contains a special Customizer folder with a variety of starter and advanced implementation settings and controls.

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