Kntnt's base theme for Beaver Themer

Minimalistic WordPress theme for Beaver Themer and Beaver Builder.

Description

Kntnt's base theme for Beaver Themer is based on Automattic's thorough and well-made starter theme _s (pronounced underscores).

While _s is intended as a starting point for building theme by hand, Kntnt base theme is intended as a starting point for building theme by using Beaver Themer and Beaver Builder.

Rationale

Beaver Themer is a great tool that allows you to build a theme by using Beaver Builder. But to work, Beaver Themer requires a supporting theme.

Many of them comes with bells and whistles which are unnecessary since you can and often do override them with Beaver Themer. That holds true even for themes which are supposedly light-weight, including Beaver Theme and Astra.

Kntnts Base Theme is missing all bells and whistles. With Beaver Themer installed, you will not see any headers or footers, nor a sidebar. It is just a clean slate.

But Kntnt Base Theme is not too simplistic. To ensure basic features and best practice it is built on _s which provides "a thousand hour head start". _s is created by Automattic — the company behind WordPress — and is used as the starting point for many of their themes, including recent themes bundled with WordPress (e.g. Twenty Seventeen).

Installation

Install the usually way.

Get started

Your site will look really crappy after installing and activating Kntnt Base Theme. Don't panic. That is intentional. Your next step would be to create layouts for header, footer, posts/pages, archives and a 404-page. It takes just a few minutes to get a really beautiful theme which then can modify as you please. This is whart you need to do:

1. Visit your sites backend at /wp-admin.
2. Install and activate Beaver Themer and Beaver Builder.
3. Select Builder » Themer Layouts in the admin menu.
4. Create a header layout:
   1. Click on Add New-button near the top of the screen.
   2. Enter Header in the Title-field, select Header from the Layout-dropdown, and click on the Add Themer Layout-button.
   3. Select Entire Site as Location on the next screen, and click on the Publish-button.
5. Create a footer layout:
   1. Click on Add New-button near the top of the screen.
   2. Enter Footer in the Title-field, select Footer from the Layout-dropdown, and click on the Add Themer Layout-button.
   3. Select Entire Site as Location on the next screen, and click on the Publish-button.
6. Create a post and page layout:
   1. Click on Add New-button near the top of the screen.
   2. Enter Singular in the Title-field, select Singular from the Layout-dropdown, and click on the Add Themer Layout-button.
   3. Select All Singular as Location on the next screen, and click on the Publish-button.
7. Create an archive layout:
   1. Click on Add New-button near the top of the screen.
   2. Enter Archive in the Title-field, select Archive from the Layout-dropdown, and click on the Add Themer Layout-button.
   3. Select All Archives as Location on the next screen, and click on the Publish-button.
8. Create an "page not found" layout:
   1. Click on Add New-button near the top of the screen.
   2. Enter Page not found (404) in the Title-field, select 404 from the Layout-dropdown, and click on the Add Themer Layout-button.
   3. Select All Users as Users on the next screen, and click on the Publish-button.
9. Go to the front of your site and enjoy!

Styling

The only stylesheet used by the theme is style.css.

You can leave it as it is, and make all your styling through Beaver Builder. Things you cannot modify directly through Beaver Builder's user interface, can be modify by adding custom CSS in Beaver Builder.

You can also modify and extend style.css as you wish.

Sass

You can re-generate style.css from Sass-files found in the sass-directory. To do that you need Node.js and follow these steps:

1. Open a terminal and change working directory to the theme's directory (where you find style.css).
2. Install node-sass-chokidar by following command: npm install.
3. Re-generate style.css with following command: npm run build.

Run npm run build every time you you want to re-generate style.css.

You can also automate the re-generation by starting npm run watch and let it run in the background. style.css will automatically be re-generated every time a file in the sass-directory is changed. When you are done with your adjustments of the sass-files, turn off the automatic re-generation by simply stopping the background process started with npm run watch.

Updating

The purpose of _s is not to be a basic theme, but to be a starting point for developers to create their own theme. However, it makes it difficult to incorporate bug fixes and improvements made to _s.

Kntnt Base Theme therefore leave files originating from _s as untouched as possible. Inevitable modifications are made so that it is easy to create an apprehensible patch file with diff and apply it to later versions of _s.

Future plans

Plans for future versions of the theme includes options in the customizer to set global colors and fonts (including fonts from Gooogle Fonts).

Changelog

1.0

Initial release.