Base

A Lightweight Grid Structure

We wrote our own 12 column grid using the same CSS classes as Zurb’s Foundation 6 – so as long as you are familiar with rows and columns… you are golden. What’s nifty is that our grid uses NO JS. It’s pretty snazzy and lightning fast. 🙂

Full Micro Format and Schema Support

Google loves Base. Out of the box, every page is automatically loaded with micro format markup. Even if a user selects to no longer “physically” show their page option’s meta data – Google will still be able to read it.

Modern Compliance

All images, captions, comments, sidebars, menus, search and inputs are HTML5 compliant. All grids, columns and styling are cross-browser compatible (even on Edge).

Handy Page Options

The Base theme allows users to select individual checkboxes to show whether or not a page’s title, description, breadcrumbs, meta data, or footer widgets should be loaded onto a page. Notice that I did not say “shown” on a page… if any of the checkboxes are selected, the data is actually never even loaded onto the page. Thank you PHP conditions.

Multiple Templates

A full-width, left-sidebar, right-sidebar and dual-sidebar template have been developed. Each template is able to showcase a full-width, “parallax like” banner image simply by using the default WordPress featured image meta-box (these images are fully responsive, use SRCset and support both OG and Twitter card formats when shared).

Nifty Sidebars

Base loads a right-desktop-sidebar, right-mobile-sidebar, left-desktop-sidebar and left-mobile-sidebar. If users don’t want to show their sidebars on mobile, all they have to do is remove widgets from their mobile sections and wallah… now they have no sidebars killing their mobile vibe and absolutely 0 custom CSS or code was needed to make it happen. 😉 This method also gives administrators the ability to show different content to their desktop and mobile users. Also, if a page or post supports comments… AND that post has at least one comment – a comment sidebar is loaded.

WordPress Customizer Utilization

Settings unique to Base allow you to add social network URL’s with automated icon support (shown in the bottom of the footer) and a theme logo as well (shown to the left of the main menu) all within the WordPress Customizer.

Reduced Bloat

The Base theme contains only your BASIC necessities. Base loads one CSS file and one JS file — the way it should be. Yes, the base theme does load Gravity Forms, but it doesn’t load Gravity Forms’ CSS, only the form’s HTML. All The form and input CSS is pre-styled. It’s this type of thinking that makes Base lightweight. The entire theme’s CSS file is a few thousand lines of non-minified code, which really is not that much considering that one file contains all font-css, grid-css, page-css, responsive-css and fallbacks.

Smart Scripts

Google Analytics is locally hosted A cron job has been set up to replace the analytics script if the GA code changes. Fonts are locally hosted (including Font Awesome). All JS scripts are deferred on load. jQuery is dequeued, then re-registered using jquery.min.js straight from Google’s CDN, then enqueued in the footer. Gravity forms and most all other JS is also loaded in the footer.

Premium Plugin Support

We try to not depend on plugins when we develop, but below are the core plugins used on each and every client-focused WordPress website. Because of this, Base also uses all of the below plugins.

• Advanced Custom Fields – used for customization
• Gravity Forms – used for all forms (except comments)
• Yoast SEO Premium – used for search engine optimization, breadcrumbs and managing redirects
• WP Smush Pro – used for automatic image resizing and lossless image compression
• Clean Talk Anti Spam – used as a firewall to block bots from pinging the website and to disallow fake form submissions