Since weLaika was born, one of our best efforts was focused on using WordPress, one of the most flexible and widely-adapted Content Management Systems. One of the main concerns we had with this otherwise fantastic framework was the quantity of code we had to constantly rewrite inside each single WordPress installation to allow our theme templates to work.

So we started to think about how we could optimize the process of bootstrapping the basic structure of our theme templates. And we started experimenting :)

At first, we created wphamlsass (wphamlsass).

The first attempt was still missing some development feature, was more complex to deploy and had a few amount of helpers. So we decided to spend some more development time on our framework.

The result of our work was Wordless.

What is Wordless?

Wordless is a WordPress plugin (how about that?) that allow programmers to write better code with new, shiny and improved working tools.

So what can I do with Wordless?

WordLess makes you write better code: better code means simpler, more functional and rational code. Thanks to the Rails framework, we had a clear idea of how to improve the code structure in our themes: we borrowed from Rails the folder structure and the concept of controlling the routing of the theme from just one router file.

WordLess brings along a set of improved working tools: you can write your views using pHAMLp (a PHP porting of HAML), your stylesheets with SASS and Compass and your javascript code with Coffeescript.

I bet you are very puzzled right now.

“WHAT ARE ALL THESE CRAZY STUFF? I WANT PURE HTML FOR MY VIEWS, PURE CSS FOR MY STYLESHEETS AND PURE JAVASCRIPT FOR MY JAVASCRIPT”

Well, there is no excuse from us. We just happen to like these things.

We find these tools terribly good for writing elegant, concise and maintainable code. They work well and do wonders for us. We think that you may like to learn something new and try them on.

That is all, we’re not crazy hipsters: we just want to user the best tool for the job and we really find this stuff amazing. But if you feel like these tools do not fit your needs, you can always use plain PHP, CSS and JS in your Wordless theme. It’s ok with us.

Does it actually work?

We currently use Wordless for all our client WordPress work. We know it’s not (yet!) perfect but we also know that it dramatically improved our life as programmers.

To make it even more awesome, we filled Worldless with a tons of helpers (I mean like fifty or something!), we added preset code for hooks, custom post types, menus and thumbnails management in the Wordless theme generator. In the upcoming articles, we’ll explain them in a much closer detail.

I’m not scared, how do I install this?

You can find all the documentation on the Github repo. Please report to us any question and bugs you may happen to bump into, we will be very much grateful.