Wordless is a wordpress plugin and a little framework written to develop Wordpress themes from scratch, with a number of bells and whistles in regard of development workflow, code organization and modern languages.
It’s been out for a lot of time, we used it to ship a lot of projects and preserve our developers’ happiness despite they were coding with WordPress! :trollface:
It was born with innovation in mind: 6 years ago the plugin almost introduced in the WordPress scenario a consolidated foundation for writing themes with a sane helper library which any developer could read and write, an easy and familiar way to write templates using partials and HAML templating system, writing stylesheets using SASS and JavaScript using Coffeescript.
Keep in mind that 6 years ago all that things was almost hipster! 😱
That was the time when the Ruby on Rails community was pushing forward the front-end development flow and technologies. SASS is written in Ruby, Coffeescript was endorsed as default JS dialect by Rails, clean and minimalist templating systems like HAML, Slim, Jade were all flourishing all around those communities. And weLaika was inside those communities and we always questioned why it was stuck in a struggling WordPress development experience.
Our answer to that struggle was Wordless. And introducing a bit of Ruby was the only way to go. That was the place to be
But later…
…the front-end development world has completely changed. Node was born and its success brought it to all of our laptops, all of our tasks runners. JavaScript was arrived, and it was anymore meant to fade your buttons in on mouse over.
With it’s 2.0 release, Wordless embraced the change.
Ruby, HAML, sprockets, RVM, rbenv: all gave up the step to Node, libsassc, webpack, Pug, npm/yarn, wp-cli, BrowserSync. So I’d like to say: welcome back, Wordless!
Oh and the plugin is completely backwards compatible with themes developed with Wordless 1.x! Just transparently continue to work the way you were doing, if you need to.
Wanna try?
If you are curious about running
1
yarn run server
to start developing your next WordPress theme:
- head on to Wordless README
- wait for the updated documentation we’re going to publish in the next weeks
- wait for a couple of how-to and tutorials we’re going to publish on our blog in the next weeks