If you are the kind of person who like to create WordPress theme from scratch I would recommend Forge. It is a brilliantly constructed toolkit that lives in the command line to bootstrap and develop your website using SASS, LESS and CoffeeScript.
The use of this software is utterly simple and require a bit of command line knowledge.
There is a chance you will have Ruby installed on your desktop/server. Fire up terminal and type in:
$ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643) [x86_64-darwin11.3.0]
Great, now to install the gem:
$ gem install forge
Once it is installed, let’s get started…
$ forge create superhero
A few things will whizz across your screen and you need to link it up to your WordPress theme directory.
$ forge link /wordpress/wp-content/themes/my-theme
Switch to the directory:
$ cd superhero
The directory layout will look similar to this:
The first thing to do is to edit the config.rb file to fill in the details of the theme.
Let’s fire up the forge!
$ forge watch
Using inline Guardfile.
Guard is now watching at '/Users/craig/Sites/superhero'
Building all assets
Copying templates over
Copying functions over
Now we are ready to build our theme. When you edit the files in templates and building the CSS using SASS or LESS in source/assets/stylesheets/, as soon you save the files, it will compile on the fly what you have modify. This is the beauty of forge allowing you to work quickly and learning how themes are done from scratch.
When you have finished building the theme, you need to exit forge in terminal by typing exit. Now compile your theme: forge build superhero and copy the folder to name-of-site/wp-content/themes/.
For more in-depth information about forge, check out their manual and start creating themes!
