LittleBizzy

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HoverCraft

Over the past several years, the WordPress “theme” industry has grown amazingly large — literally millions of dollars are spent every year on premium themes, frameworks, custom design work, and more. While the difference between “frameworks” and “starter themes” can be debated elsewhere, suffice it to say that Starter aims to be a very simple starter theme for WordPress (not a parent theme, and definitely not a framework). It’s entire purpose is to be hacked like crazy… yippee! :)

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— Albert Einstein

The philosophy behind Starter is that a true “starter theme” should not require a developer to first install, and then strip out all the bloat and features that they do not use or wish to retain. Rather, a proper “starter theme” should be as bare bones as possible, even across months or years of WordPress versions and functions, so that after installation a developer can focus immediately on customization and “building out” their concept rather than “cleaning out” a load of junk.

Starter is the Flappy Bird of Starter Themes…

Currently, Genesis and Canvas are popular “frameworks” for WordPress, and Sage and Underscores and Bones are popular so-called “starter themes” for WordPress. While all of these are pretty cool, they can be a bit complex to understand (at least for us and many of our clients), or in some cases, a bit lacking in performance optimization. Like Flappy Bird, we don’t really aim to impress with fancy code (seriously, it’s very simple), but we know that this minimalist template “just works” and loads super fast (even on mobile devices) and is ultimately very easy to customize for various projects. One of the biggest differences is that Starter does not pre-load a ton of CSS classes or custom PHP functions into all of its theme files! Loading speed and SEO (especially the header) were key focuses when crafting this unimpressive piece of work…

Who’s Behind This And What Type of License?

Starter is a poor man’s starter theme for WordPress by Jesse Nickles, the founder of LittleBizzy. It is released under a unique copyright that is included with the software’s repository on GitHub (no MIT/GPL).

Below is a partial list of features found in the theme:

customize admin area??
custom post types??

  • 100% image-free
  • FontAwesome enabled
  • focused entirely on speed
  • as little javascript as possible
  • mobile-first and fully responsive
  • jQuery libraries from CDNJS (optional)
  • no dashboard options or control panels (phew!)
  • navigation menu is JS-free select menu on mobile devices
  • no custom post types enabled by default (add them if you wish)
  • only a single (mostly empty) CSS stylesheet (no inline styling, woo hoo!)
  • not meant to show off modern scripts, just meant to work and load quickly
  • HTTP headers, header.php, and <head> are pre-optimized for SEO and caching
  • use with WooCommerce and avoid having to constantly “update” embedded theme files
  • no requirements or prerequisites whatsoever besides PHP (i.e. no Ruby, Bootstrap, Node.js, etc)
  • removes extra junk from WordPress (wp_head), WooCommerce, TinyMCE, and more in functions.php
  • ditch SEO plugins: header.php manages titles, meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and Schema microdata
  • no bizarre homemade “functions” or “hooks” that you have to research what the hell they mean
  • no inherent use of SASS, LESS, or other confusing/trendy CSS extensions or pre-processors
  • 960 grid layout used for content areas, 100% width on header/footer and homepage
  • custom “post excerpt” length and featured image functions in functions.php
  • includes simple jQuery scroll to top button in footer (remove if desired)
  • includes “opt-in” forms in sidebar, underneath posts, and in footer
  • integrated author meta tags and sharing icons on single.php
  • integrated Gravatar support for comments and author meta
  • defaults to noindex anything that is not a “page” or “post”
  • integrated breadcrumbs, short URLs, and pagination
  • virtually impossible to be infected with malware
  • optimized Google Analytics code in footer
  • as few files as reasonably possible
  • features a “welcome bar” too!
  • well-commented code/CSS
  • HTML5 valid (mostly)
Download ZIP
View On GitHub

NOTICE: We recommend using alongside CloudFlare, SSL, Opcache, WP-Bitly, and some other Must Use plugins… also, our team is not available to provide support or consultation but we have some Experts that we recommend :)

== TEMP ==

The theme repository includes a few “example” pages that are included:

style.css
404.php
archive.php
breadcrumbs.php
comments.php
footer.php
functions.php
header.php
index.php
page-example-sidebar.php
page-example-full-width.php
page-example-woocommerce-product.php
page-contact.php
page-home.php
page.php
pagination.php
sidebar.php
single.php
style.php