This is a compilation of techniques we commonly use when developing Wordpress sites. While the bare-bones Starkers theme is a great boilerplate, we noticed that we would remove a good bulk of the comments and a fair amount of functionality (extra layouts, css files, and logic). We've also adjusted it to our conventions (css, functions, etc) and added reusable code snippets.
Inside the lib directory is a file called custom fields, which contains code adapted from this blog post. It is intended to be a lightweight solution for adding custom fields to different post types (e.g. pages, posts, and custom post types). If a custom field is defined for particular post type, when you visit the edit page, you'll see a field designed specifically for it (e.g. text, textarea, checkbox). This can make it easier for non-technical users to make updates; in contrast to the default custom fields GUI in which you have to use a generic key/value system.
Without Custom Fields (Wordpress default)
With Custom Fields enabled
- Removed a large number of comments for readability.
- Removed archive layouts for tags and categories, this will have them default to archives.php which handles the proper heading.
- Removed twentyten_filter_wp_title() from functions.php, since it conflict with the All in one SEO Pack plugin.
- Removed screenshot.png and other starkers images.
- Removed the following infrequently used templates: attachment.php, author.php, loop-attachment.php, loop-page.php, loop-single.php, onecolumn-page.php, and sidebar-footer.php.
- Simplified the functionality in loop.php and header.php.
- Removed html5 elements from header.php.
- Added skeleton structure for a custom post type and taxonomy in functions.php. This is to get started quickly without referring to documentation.
- Added lib directory with custom_fields.php, a pseudo-plugin for creating fields for post types with a specific GUI. There is an example of how to use it in functions.php.
- Added searchform.php which overrides the Wordpress default search form.