Skip to content

Wordless theme anatomy

Jump to bottom Edit New page
Alessandro Fazzi edited this page Jun 10, 2018 · 3 revisions

Wordless Theme anatomy

That's a typical Wordless theme directory structure:

your_theme_dir
├── assets/
│   ├── fonts/
│   ├── images/
│   ├── javascripts/
│   └── stylesheets/
├── config/
│   ├── initializers/
│   └── locales/
├── theme/
│   ├── assets/
│   ├── helpers/
│   └── views/
├── tmp/
├── Procfile
├── index.php
├── package.json
├── screenshot.png
├── style.css
├── webpack.config.coffee
└── yarn.lock

Now let's see in detail what is the purpose of all those directories.

Routing

The index.php serves as a router to all the theme views.

<?php

if (is_front_page()) {
  render_view("static/homepage)");
} else if (is_post_type_archive("portfolio_work")) {
  render_view("portfolio/index");
} else if (is_post_type("portfolio_work")) {
  render_view("portfolio/show");
}

As you can see, you first determine the type of the page using WordPress conditional tags, and then delegate the rendering to some particular view.

Here you can read more about render_view().

Here you can read a tip about using Page Template Wordpress' feature.

Rendering

render_view()

The main helper function used to render a view is - fantasy name - render_view(). Here's its signature:

/**
    * Renders a view. Views are rendered based on the routing.
    *   They will show a template and a yielded content based
    *   on the user requested page.
    *
    * @param  string $name   Filename with path relative to theme/views
    * @param  string $layout The template to use to render the view
    * @param  array  $locals An associative array. Keys will be variables'
    *                        names and values will be variable values inside
    *                        the view
    */
    function render_view($name, $layout = 'default', $locals = array()) 	{
    	/* [...] */    
    }

Thanks to this helper, Worldess will always intercept PUG files and automatically translate them to HTML.

Extension for $name can always be omitted.

Inside the theme/views folder you can scaffold as you wish, but you'll have to always pass the relative path

render_view('folder1/folder2/myview')

The $locals array will be auto-extract()-ed inside the required view, so you can do

render_view('folder1/folder2/myview', 'default', array('title' => 'My title'))

and inside theme/views/folder1/folder2/myview.pug

h1= $title
render_partial()

Render parrtial is almost the same as its sister render_view(), but it does not accept a layout as argument. Here is its signature

/**
    * Retrievs contents of partial without printing theme
    * @param string $name The template filenames (those not starting
    *                        with an underscore by convention)
    *
    * @param  array  $locals An associative array. Keys will be variables'
    *                        names and values will be variable values inside
    *                        the partial
    */
    function get_partial_content($name, $locals = array()) {
        /* [...] */
    }

Partial templates – usually just called “partials” – are another device for breaking the rendering process into more manageable chunks. Partials are named with a leading underscore to distinguish them from regular views, even though they are referred to without the underscore.

Layouts (theme/views/layouts directory)

When Wordless renders a view, it does so by combining the view within a layout. Within a layout, you have access to the wl_yield() helper to combine it with the main content:

doctype html
html
  head= render_partial("layouts/head")
  body
    .page-wrapper
      header.site-header= render_partial("layouts/header")
      section.site-content= wl_yield()
      footer.site-footer= render_partial("layouts/footer")
    - wp_footer()

Please note that for content that is shared among all pages in your application, you can use partials directly from layouts.

#### Theme Views (theme/views/**/*.pug or theme/views/**/*.php)

That's the directory where you'll find yourself coding for most of the time. Here you can create a view for each main page of your theme, using Pug syntax or plain HTML. Feel free to create subdirectories to group together the files. Here's what could be an example for the typical WordPress loop in an archive page:

// theme/views/posts/archive.html.pug
h2 Blog archive
ul.blog_archive
  while have_posts()
    - the_post()
    li.post= render_partial("posts/single")
// theme/views/posts/_single.html.pug
h3!= link_to(get_the_title(), get_permalink())
.content= get_the_filtered_content()

Wordless uses Pug.php - formerly called Jade.php - for your Pug views, a great PHP port of the PugJS templating language. In this little snippet, please note the following:

  • The view is delegating some rendering work to a partial called _single.html.pug;
  • There's no layout here, just content: the layout of the page is stored in a secondary file, placed in the theme/views/layouts directory, as mentioned in the paragraph above;
  • We're already using two of the 40+ Wordless helper functions, link_to() and get_the_filtered_content(), to DRY up this view;
  • Because the link_to helper will return html code, we used unecsaper buffered code print PUG's function: !=. Otherwise we'd have obtained escaped html tags.

It looks awesome, right?

Helpers (theme/helpers/*.php files)

Helpers are basically small functions that can be called in your views to help keep your code stay DRY. Create as many helper files and functions as you want and put them in this directory, they will all be required within your views, together with the default Wordless helpers. These are just a small subset of all the 40+ tested and documented helpers Wordless gives you for free:

  • lorem() - A "lorem ipsum" text and HTML generator;
  • pluralize() - Attempts to pluralize words;
  • truncate()- Truncates a given text after a given length;
  • new_post_type() and new_taxonomy() - Help you create custom posts and taxonomy;
  • distance_of_time_in_words() - Reports the approximate distance in time between two dates;

Our favourite convention to write custom hepers is to write almost 1 file per function and naming both the same way. It will be easier to find with cmd+p 😉

Initializers (config/initializers/*.php files)

Remember the freaky functions.php file, the one where you would drop every bit of code external to the theme views (custom post types, taxonomies, wordpress filters, hooks, you name it). That was just terrible, isn't it? Well, forget it. Wordless lets you split your code into many modular initializer files, each one with a specific target:

config/initializers
├──── backend.php
├──── custom_post_types.php
├──── default_hooks.php
├──── hooks.php
├──── login_template.php
├──── menus.php
├──── shortcodes.php
├──── thumbnail_sizes.php
  • backend: remove backend componentes such as widgets, update messages, ecc
  • custom_post_types: well...if you need to manage taxonomies, this is the place to be
  • default_hooks: this are used by default wordless' behaviours; tweak them only if you know what are you doing
  • hooks: this is intended to be your custom hooks collector
  • menus: register new WP nav_menus from here
  • shortcodes: as it says
  • thumbnail_sizes: if you need custom thumbnailing sizes

These are just some file name examples: you can organize them the way you prefer. Each file in this directory will be automatically required by Wordless.

Locale files (config/locales directory)

Just drop all your theme locale files in this directory. Wordless will take care of calling load_theme_textdomain() for you.

Note that due to WordPress localization framework, you need to append our "wl" domain when using internationalization. For example, calling __("News") without specifying the domain will not work.

You'll have to add the domain "wl" to make it work: __("News", "wl")

Assets

Wordless has two different places where you want to put your assets:

  • Place all your custom, project related assets into theme/assets/*
  • Place all the static images and vendor assets (i.e. vendor JS plugins) into assets/*
  • Since you are backed by Webpack, you can use NPM to import new dependencies following a completely standard approach

The Fast Way

  • jQuery is included by default for you (not aliased to $ though)
  • write your sass in theme/assets/stylesheets/screen.sass
  • write your coffeescript in theme/assets/javascripts/application.js.coffee

and all will automagically work! :) The long way follows

Add a custom footer
Add a custom sidebar
Clone this wiki locally