Roots Roots is a starting WordPress theme made for developers that’s based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Blueprint CSS (or 960.gs) and Starkers that will help you rapidly create brochure sites and blogs. It has a bunch of excellent tweaks to WordPress, plus support for the best CSS frameworks including Foundation and 1140 Grid. This is a solid theme framework that is constantly updated and used by many developers, you cannot go wrong with it.
My favourite set up is that of using Roots as a starting base, modifying it according to my needs. I use the Foundation CSS layout and remove the others which I don’t need. I would also rebuild the theme options page according to the needs of the theme I’m developing. The fact that there are another two Foundation implementations is also cool. For example, if I need a bbpress layout (which is not provided with Roots), I could get that from Reverie. If I need an Obit image uploader I can use the one from Foundation for WordPress. This setup is just what works best for me, you might of course have different aims and opt for another framework from the ones below. Hopefully this posts helps to bring to light the different options we have at the moment within the WordPress community.Here are some websites developed with Roots
Reverie (based on Foundation) Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.It is extremely easy to create your blog, CMS, brochure and any other kind of sites with Reverie. You can see some samples on ZURB and how they make these prototypes. Did I just mentioned Reverie works well with bbPress 2.0, even without styling? Reverie Framework inherits all the cool features from Foundation, and packs with several other interesting features to optimize the experience for WordPress and HTML5. Including customized output for WordPress menus and caption. You can view the features list by scrolling down.Reverie utilizes Foundation’s grid to implement layouts. It is quite easy to start building your own layouts (like this page). You can read Foundation’s documentation for how to implement these cool features.
Foundation for WordPress
Foundation, for WordPress, is a blank starter theme with the exceptional capabilities of ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate.As a neat-freak designer, it’s sometimes intimidating and frustrating looking at a WordPress theme framework that’s jam-packed with unnecessary extras and bloated code. This doesn’t include your common templates such as comments.php etc, it’s the bare-minimum, allowing you to start from ground-zero and build a perfect website – keeping organisation and cleanliness in mind.Foundation, for WordPress, features everything ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate have to offer, however, some changes have been made to tailer it to WordPress, these include:
Orbit for WordPress, ZURB’s image and content slider tailored for WordPress
A ySlow score of 95 (in regards to ‘Small Site or Blog’) & without a build script
SEO features such as an optomised Google Analytics snippet, robots.txt and Schema.org attributes
Beautiful, coda-style tooltips
Normalize.css, you’ll never go wrong with this dynamic reset
Reveal for WordPress, a simple modal box by ZURB made to work in WordPress
A function to provide Google’s jQuery CDN over WordPress’ local copy
Failsafe jQuery, with a fallback to WordPress’ local copy
Yoko Theme Yoko is a modern and flexible WordPress theme. With the responsive layout based on CSS3 media queries, the theme adjusts to different screen sizes. The design is optimized for big desktop screens, tablets and small smartphone screens. To make your blog more individual, you can use the new post formats (like gallery, aside or quote), choose your own logo and header image, customize the background and link color.The theme requires WordPress 3.1+ to run. It has following features:
Cross-browser compatible (tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 8+)
HTML5 (with fallback for IE < 9) and CSS3
Responsive layout (CSS3 media queries, not supported in IE < 9, but you can use libraries like Respond.js by Scott Jehl or CSS3-Mediaqueries-js by Wouter van der Graaf to make it work in older versions of IE.)
WordPress post formats (aside, gallery, image, video, link and quote)
Skeleton WordPress Theme Skeleton is a simple, responsive theme from Simple Themes. It has in-built templates for Jigoshop and bbPress and is based on the Skeleton boilerplate.Customizing Skeleton can be achieved with the Theme Options panel under Appearance → Theme Options. The theme options panel uses the Theme Options Framework by WP Theming. Advanced users can customize the options.php using the documentation found on their site.
Whiteboard Framework Whiteboard Framework has been helping WordPress developers cut back on their development time and improve their WordPress powered websites since 2008.Whiteboard framework for WordPress was developed to speed up the process of developing a WordPress theme. Whiteboard does so by eliminating the time spent on code common to all WordPress themes and includes non-intrusive code that improves the overall WordPress theme in many ways – including SEO, speed, usability, and mobile support.
Comes with a minimalist design to use or build off of
Lightweight and well-noted
The theme and Less Framework can be easily removed if desired for quick and easy WordPress theme development
Strong and flexible div structure
Basic styles and classes to speed up theme development
Strong Search Engine Optimization
More dynamic Classes and IDs than any other WordPress framework
Many awesome WordPress features such as manageable menus, background, and header image as well as featured images, several widget areas, and more
Follows the Web Accessibility Initiative
HTML5 with graceful degradation
CSS3 Animations with graceful degradation
Follows WordPress’ CSS Coding Standards
Compatible with WordPress 3.0 and up with fallbacks for older versions of WordPress
Cross browser compatible
Bones
Frameworks are great, but sometimes they make things more complicated than they need to be. Bones is bare and as minimalistic as possible. It’s meant to be used as a per-project template, this means no Child Themes. Hooray!Taking the Mobile-First approach is the way to go when building a responsive project. So Bones comes ready to roll with a unique LESS/Sass setup that serves minimal resources to smaller screens and scales up depending on your viewport. As anyone who’s ever browsed on a 3G connection will tell you, it’s a difference maker.Bones comes loaded with LESS / Sass
Get started working with the future of CSS today. Using LESS or Sass can speed up your development time when used properly. Bones gets you started by giving you a great starting point.