The Bootplate Theme Framework empowers novices and professional developers alike to quickly and easily build awesome WordPress-powered responsive websites. Bootplate provides a secure, performance optimized, and automatically updated foundation so your WordPress sites stay as awesome as the day they were launched.
Ever wonder what a WordPress Theme Framework is, exactly?
Our Vision
Building even totally custom WordPress themes contains a lot of repetition. There are certain templates you just end up re-creating again and again. Worse, you end up using a lot of functions that make the theme play well with WordPress, popular WordPress plugin classes, as well as different versions of Bootstrap.
Our vision for Bootplate is pretty simple. Here goes.
- Use WordPress Themeing Best Practices
- Extend via Plugins (not theme-specific)
- Customize using Vanilla CSS (with some helpful stuff already there)
- Keep it supported using Child Themes
- Build for Bootstrap v4 Alpha 2, with fallbacks and custom CSS for production-ready Bootstrap 3.3.x
- Mobile-first, Fast-loading (no bloat)
- No Branding–at least not ours
- Free and Open Source
- Automatic updates and upgrades
There are several projects on GitHub now that helped inspire this project, including BREW, Bones, and 320. But, Bootplate is really a theme framework for professional web designers and developers. It doesn’t include a large, complex, heavy theme customization dashboard (it does have a little one). You’ll want to (and need to) totally transform it using Child Themes–just like you would totally transform Bootstrap and simply use it as a framework.
That’s the vision, anyway.
The Nerds
JDM Digital is a digital agency specializing in web design and based in Dallas, Texas. The designers and developers there essentially built Bootplate for themselves to re-use, test and extend.
Once they got it pretty much ready for production, they had a party. After a few too many beers, they decided to offer the code base up on GitHub (and eventually on WordPress.org) for the world to download and use for free.
We’re glad they did that. We hope you will be too.
Support the Project
The project is free and open-source. If you’d like to help support it, there are a few ways to do so.
- Submit your idea for improvement on GitHub.
- Fork the code on GitHub and extend it yourself. Your awesome code may become a part of the master code base!
- Enable the “Theme Credit” text in the footer of the site (it’s off by default).
If none of those sound interesting to you, we’re pretty much out of ideas.