Introducing Bricks, a new WordPress starter theme

A few years ago I rebooted my life ad started a new career as a web developer, mainly focusing on WordPress websites built with custom themes (Since then I aimed to acquire more solid Front-End skills, and during last year I took advatage of COVID-19 lockdowns to study many Jamstack techs, namely Vue, Nuxt, Tailwind, Netlify, and related stuff).

I tried many existing starter themes, from the most famous to the less-known projects, but for one reason or another I always felt that they missed something, and I decided to build one myself, keeping in mind some requirements:

• it had to be a fast and easy way to start a new project based on Bootstrap, by integrating it in the templates and providing the means to customize its theme variables;
• it had to include all basic WordPress features required in every project, without having to code them everytime;
• it had to have a modular nature, leveraging get_template_part() whenever possible, to have a component-like structure;
• it had to take into account SEO and performance, thus being lightweight and optimized in these respects;
• it had to automate some common tasks, like compiling CSS and JS, providing support for custom fonts, localizations, etc;
• it had to provide support for some optional Javascript libraries useful for the Front-End;

So, Bricks was born. I started working on it in the beginning of 2019, and now, two years later and after having extensively tested and tweaked it, I decided to release it as an open-source project, that you can access from its GitHub repository:

A short list of some of Bricks' interesting features:

• Bootstrap 4 (support for custom theme compiled from source Sass files, and JavaScript from Bootstrap Native).
• WP Bootstrap Navwalker.
• Font Awesome 5 (SVG with JavaScript version, parsed and minified by gulp-fa-minify).
• Autoprefixer.
• PurgeCSS.
• Rollup and Babel.
• BrowserSync.
• Automatic conversion of custom fonts into woff2 web formats.
• Support for localization, with a task that creates a .pot template file.
• Support for integration of some optional JavaScript libraries such as (aos, [lightgallery.js] and swiper).

Feel free to try it and test it! Contributions and suggestions are welcome!