Introducing Bootplate

We’re proud to announce the release of a super fast, mobile-first, Bootstrap v4 theme framework we’ve designed for building awesome and responsive WordPress websites.  We think of it more as a theme framework than a lowly starter theme, but read on and decide for yourself.

Preview Bootplate

We combined a working theme preview with a documentation site at bootplate.jdmdigital.co which is the “parent” theme.  It’s pretty basic, and that’s intentional.   It’s designed to be extended via plugins and transformed using child themes.

Check it out at: http://bootplate.jdmdigital.co

You’ll find we’ve actually combined classes and grid options from production-ready Bootstrap 3.3.6 and from Bootstrap 4-alpha 2. Sprinkle on a little performance work and some WordPress best practices, and you’ll find Bootplate could be your go-to for all Bootstrap-based WordPress theme design projects.

About the Project

Building even totally custom WordPress themes (as we do) involves 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 the same functions helping your new theme play well with WordPress.

The original vision for Bootplate was simple.

• 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 GitHub Updater
• Build for Bootstrap v4 Alpha 2, with fallbacks and custom CSS for Bootstrap 3.3.x
• Make it mobile-first, and wicked-fast to load
• No Branding (at least not ours)
• Free and open source

The web design nerds around JDM HQ essentially built Bootplate for ourselves to re-use, test and extend.  Once we got it pretty much there, we threw a little party.   After a few too many beers, we decided to offer the master code base up on GitHub (and eventually on WordPress.org) for the world to download and use for free.

Was that a great idea?  You tell us.

The Future is in BETA

All-in we spent 15 days writing code for 25 commits and 13,823 lines of code.  No small feat given we’re doing this in our “free time.”  Now that v0.6-alpha 2 has been released, we’re already looking forward to v0.7-beta just around the corner.

Can you tell we’re just having too much fun?!