Introduction

Barebones is a lightweight WordPress starter theme. It serves as a foundation for developers who are building bespoke WordPress websites.

Barebones includes the building blocks commonly required by custom WordPress development including theme setup, asset loading, editor styles, menu management, Sass organisation, responsive utilities and custom block support.

The theme stays intentionally small so each project can define its own design system, content structure and frontend behaviour. It remains close to conventional WordPress architecture whilst including a helpful file structure for templates, functions and frontend assets. All of these tools are ready to be expanded upon as you implement your own custom design and functionality.

Our objective with Barebones is to help developers move quickly from setup to bespoke development in a framework that delivers scalable, manageable code for long-lasting websites.

Barebones is not a finished visual theme, page builder or complete design system. It does not provide a ready-made component library or a full suite of production blocks. It gives developers a clean starting point from where they can build their custom WordPress projects.

Useful features of Barebones include:

• a number of setup functions which handle asset loading, menu declarations and the removal of unnecessary WordPress assets
• Vite asset compilation including support for themes using custom ACF blocks
• useful Sass variables, mixins, base styles, utilities and components that help keep code manageable whilst allowing you to build quickly and cleanly
• a fully responsive grid system with editable breakpoints supported by responsive utilities to show and hide content on different devices
• spacing and typography utilities which allow you to define consistent styling and make those same rules available through the CMS
• ACF local JSON support allowing you to keep ACF blocks defined in your repository and therefore synced across environments
• automatic custom ACF block registration; just add new modules in the blocks directory and Barebones will automatically pick them up
• block-specific Sass and JavaScript compilation to keep your code modular and deliver optimal site performance