Bare-Bones WordPress: Starting Your Theme With Starkers, HTML5 Boilerplate, and 960 Grid System

Wordpress is a great open source web application for creating dynamic websites. You can spend minutes getting it on line and in addition, create custom themes using it's very intuitive API. However, creating your own custom theme can be very time consuming with unnecessarily repetitive tasks. Starting each Wordpress project with a framework template system lets you hit the ground running so you can leave the heavy development work behind. In this talk, I will explain my approach to developing a custom child-theme from a bare-bones WordPress framework that merges Aaron T. Grogg’s Boilerplate WordPress theme and the 960 Grid System. The Boilerplate theme already combines HTML5 Boilerplate, the Starkers theme, and Eric Meyer’s Reset stylesheet while the 960 grid system remains independent. I have merged the 960 Grid System into the Boilerplate theme to make a new WordPress bare-bones theme that leaves the designer with one task: applying the design to the stylesheet.