Hello Patrick and thanks for contacting us!
1. newtheme.sh is meant to be used with dudestack only as it states in the beginning before running any commands. What it does it automatically generates the new clean slate theme for your project if you are using dudestack. It replaces the textdomains with your new theme name, it cleans up demo stuff, it resets the theme for you to start creating your new theme. It does a bunch of things and also imports our devpackages to the project. However the script will not work with any other stacks or local environments… so don’t use it unless you know what you are doing.
2. npm install installs all the components listed in package.json. Most of these are the tools needed when contributing to the air-light theme development itself but things in dependencies are actually used by the theme, at least for hamburgers and what-input. Without those the style tasks won’t run.
3. Option 1 doesn’t have the clean up script at this time. We haven’t really given any thought to the fact that someone might be using this their own way since the theme is meant to be fully hackable. We should test it more thoroughly on other local environment platforms and systems but at the moment we do not have much resources for that. So that’s why we always recommend option 2 since it’s what we ourselves use.
I’m sorry you have spent hours for this without any results… I wish you contacted earlier about these issues. We could create a clean up script for option 1 as well so that you could then just move theme under “themes” folder in your WordPress installation and start coding it. You’d still need our devpackages configured in project root to be able to compile SCSS to CSS etc.
Can I ask what local environment you are using? I could then try to be more of an advice to you. I wish this theme was more convenient for people outside our company to use and we do our best to make sure it will be in the future. We’ve had very few feedback like this so we have actually no idea how people are using the theme. You’re the first with confused feedback, I guess we presume a lot of things in our setup.
We have now improved the steps for people that use their own development setups. Also the options are swapped, this is option 2 now.
Option 2: Use in your own WordPress instance and with your own development environment like Docker, Local by Flywheel or MAMP
The version in here WordPress Theme Directory is actually a cleaned up version.
Let me now if you have any more questions.
I have my local machine setup to do all development locally. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 with LAMP and even including self-signed certificates to get SSL working locally.
I’ve used other IDE’s but have never used Visual Studio Code before. At one point about a couple of years ago I had installed and briefly run SASS but set it aside only because I didn’t have the time then to fully adopt it. I’m wanting to move toward CSS Grid for layout as much as possible.
Even using your revised Option #2 it would take me quite some time (ie: days, weeks) to get up to speed with all the tools mentioned on your Devpackages/”Modern Web Development Workflow”. I realize that your page on dudestack says “You should use this only if you really like how we do things” …but there is also the question of whether it is all suitable to the kind of work I do. And there is also a chicken-and-egg problem; eg: I wouldn’t really understand how you “do things” unless I were to spend the time getting up to speed with the tools you are using and advocating. I am not running my own web design/development agency. I appreciate your devotion to quality processes and your willingness to share them.
Do I understand correctly that if I were to follow only the first six steps of your new Option #2, that I should have a fully usable theme and that steps 7,8,9 and 10 could be eliminated if I only want to evaluate whether the theme itself is going to work for me and if I expect to use it without dudestack, sass, gulp, etc. ? Thanks.
Patrick
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This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by
patrick_here.
Thanks for this information. Yes, the things you mentioned are fully acknowledged. We are an 8 piece digital agency and this is our starter theme from our perspective. We wanted to “give back” to WordPress community in a sense and we release most of our ways if not all as open source. It’s a thin line between openness and usability but so far we have not had any complaints as we know many use our theme. On the other hand many users are from here Finland and knows some of our ways that are also described in our Handbook (Finnish only, sorry). So you are right, it’s chicken and egg and a bit of a tough cookie from people completely outside. I understand fully your concerns.
We could point out in our README that before using this theme you should
– Be comfortable with command line
– Have knowledge or eagerness to learn SCSS, gulp, npm, optionally stylelint and eslint
– Have naturally general knowledge about theming for WordPress
As for the revised Option #2, yes, you are correct. When you download the zip here in ww.wp.xz.cn you get the cleaned up theme as ww.wp.xz.cn doesn’t allow dotfiles or development related extras inside the theme. 7-10 are needed if you like to get into styling the theme via SCSS. You can skip those if you just want to fiddle around with PHP templates or code traditional CSS directly into global.css file. Files under css/ folder are the ones that get overridden if you ever decide to compile from SCSS to CSS. But if you are happy with plain CSS, please just edit global.css. I find this a bit old school though, you are missing out SCSS + PostCSS world this way but it’s not our place to say how people use our theme.
So in short, dudestack is not required. Dudestack is our version of Roots’ Bedrock that makes many things easier and more straightforward than traditional WordPress setup. However you CAN and you should use Air-light theme without any dependencies. Heck, you could even use traditional command scss --watch style.scss:style.css --style compressed (explained), we even have to do that in some of the older projects that didn’t have gulp task runner present.
Let us know how it works for you. Air-light is a result of years of hard work and aims to be the most minimal DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) type of starter point available. After constantly trying out alternatives I really know it is.
Yours,
Roni, CTO of the Dude agency
