Skeleton, a bare bones WordPress theme
Several months back I wrote a custom bare bones theme. I had tried a few starter themes in the past, but none of them really pleased me. I wanted something as bare bones as possible, so I decided to create my own. It’s worked out well for me and now it’s time to share it. There is nothing but the basics here, this is intended for theme developers who want to bypass the boring part of setting up a starter them.
Before my Skeleton theme I usually just started a WordPress theme from scratch and referred to my older themes and the WordPress Codex. I still do this, but Skeleton has been used on several projects now and it gets me past all the grunt work quickly so I can get to the interesting stuff faster. The Skeleton theme also passes the Theme-Check plugin and comes with a super basic css stylesheet. All the starter templates are done with HTML5 too. You can the Skeleton theme get it on GitHub or download the zip directly.
Vic DiNovici January 25, 2013 at 6:36 am
Thanks Ian. Is exactly what I was looking for. Any chance in the near future to make it responsive? Thanks mate.
Ian Hoar January 25, 2013 at 12:36 pm
Hey Vic, no it will not ever be responsive. I will keep it up to date if it fails to validate any new base WordPress features, but the reason I created this was so I can have a clean slate without dealing with any predefined settings. The CSS is just there to give you an idea of how things are laid out and a bare minium layout with a default install, the developer can add his preferred custom styles, media queries or framework. 😉
Devon December 29, 2014 at 12:55 pm
I built a theme using your bare-bones starter theme an next thing I know I’m getting a lot of white screens in the admin area. I’m still troubleshooting trying to figure out exactly what it is in the functions.php that’s crashing everything but beware that this starter theme hasn’t been working out. My current project I’m using underscores and it’s simplicity is it’s strength.
You seem to have a neat thing going, but now I need to figure out while it’s crashing my wordpress installation. The only crazy thing that I’ve done is imported a _custom.scss into the main style.
Ian Hoar December 29, 2014 at 1:22 pm
Hi Devon,
I haven’t updated this theme in 2 years, so it could be something introduced into WP since then. At the time of it’s release it was 100% compatible. That said it still should not have problems as WordPress is supposed to be backwards compatible.