WordPress Project Boilerplate

There are probably more WordPress boilerplates than actual themes & plugins available for bootstrapping your work on an amazing WordPress project. And that is very much okay, because every developer, every agency has their own little flavors in how they like to do things.

That is the reason we made this boilerplate. We liked the work of so many other developers before us, but we never found the perfect boilerplate that fit our style of work. The result is this, a very opinionated project boilerplate based on @wordpress/env, webpack and PostCSS.

Included in this boilerplate is the structure needed to release a theme and an acompanying plugin for a WordPress client project. As per WordPress guidlines and best practices, all business and data logic should be put into the plugin, all presentation and styles should be put into the theme.

This boilerplate will give you all the tools you need to write, test and publish your WordPress project, either for commercial clients or to publish the theme & plugin in the WordPress.org repository.

Getting started

These steps will guide you through the setup process up until you can start writing functions, markup and styles for your project.

For the sake of scope we will assume that you know the slug of your project. Please make sure that the slug is unique to the system of the client, our projects and the WordPress.org project repository.

We will also assume, that you have already configured your GitHub repository to your liking, downloaded the source of the boilerplate and uploaded it to your new repository. So let's get started:

Project Slug & Names

• Search & Replace (case sensitive) lhpbp with your new WordPress project slug
• Search & Replace (case sensitive) LHPBP with your new WordPress project slug
• Adjust details in package.json and update the file headers in theme/style.css and plugin/lhpbpp.php
• Rename the main plugin file from plugin/lhpbpp.php to plugin/<new_project_slug>p.php

Running the enviroment

• Type npm start into the terminal to spin up the docker enviroment
• Open http://localhost/wp-admin and log in with admin:password

Test Release

• Add the GH_ADMIN_TOKEN secret to the action secrets and dependabot secrets.
• Create a patch release with the github action
• Check if the release has been created and uploaded in the GitHub release section

Finishing touches

• Edit the project-README.md with the appropriate text about your theme
• Delete (or rename) the README.md (this file)
• Rename the project-README.md to README.md
• 🎉 Celebrate!