We’ve received feedback from our community that the old build workflow (using Gulp and/or webpack to generate the CSS/JS assets) included several package vulnerabilities that have not been fixed for quite a while and obviously have become unmaintained by the creators.

One could argue that this should not be problematic, as these dependencies only affect the local development system – and as long as the build process still works, there’s no need to change a running system.
But using obsolete and unsupported software can be dangerous and can break things “overnight”. Not to mention potential security risks that may arise in the web development stack.

So it was necessary to find a new simple, modern and future-proof build process for the frontend assets…
Fortunately the research did not take too long. The @wordpress/scripts package from the awesome Gutenberg community already comes with a proven and tested webpack configuration specific to WordPress development, which made it a perfect candidate to try out.

After some trial-and-error the build process worked pretty well and that’s why all our Starter Themes (Full Site Editing, Bootstrap and Material Design) have been updated to include this “webpack only” workflow from WordPress. From now on Gulp (including its several internal dependencies that are outdated) is not needed anymore.

Start the development process:
$ npm run watch
Build and minify the assets:
$ npm run build

👆 Breaking change: The build directories have been moved from /assets/css and /assets/js to /build which aligns with the @wordpress configuration. If you want to include the new workflow in an existing theme, please have a look at the source code in the Github repositories of the Starter Theme and adjust the paths of the JS/CSS assets in functions.php accordingly.

Would you like to play around with an instant WordPress installation that runs in your browser?

Visit https://them.es/playground [🪄 powered by playground.wordpress.net] and give it a try.

Quickly demonstrate the WordPress dashboard to interested people or temporarily test Themes and Plugins without the need of an entire web server:

• PHP via WebAssembly
• SQLite
• Web server via a Service Worker
• There are some limitations to consider

Our latest WordPress Plugin Directory addition integrates the awesome Bootstrap Icons (MIT) library in the WordPress rich-text toolbar without requiring any coding experience. Just the way it should be.

• 1300+ pixel perfect webfont icons
• Small filesize
• Easy WYSIWYG integration: No Shortcodes!
• Privacy by design: No CDN hosted files!
• Autofilter

You can download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory:

Of course <i> Toolbar makes a great addition to our Bootstrap Starter Theme but since the Bootstrap library is not required and the plugin has no dependencies it will work with any other theme like our Material Starter Theme and our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.

A working and maintained Emoji Picker Plugin has been brought back to WordPress. Easily add Emojis from any rich-text block like Paragraphs, Headings, Lists, etc. without leaving the Editor.

Emojis are pictograms used in instant messengers, forums and web pages to reflect emotions. They have become so popular that Oxford Dictionaries has named “😂” word of the year 2015.

Nowadays all browsers and operating systems support the Emoji characters. When picking your Emojis from the Emoji Toolbar they will be added in raw format so no images are loaded on the frontend.

Last year Github changed the name for newly created repositories: https://github.blog/changelog/2020-10-01-the-default-branch-for-newly-created-repositories-is-now-main

To align with this change we’ve decided to rename all our existing Github repositories.

If you run a local master branch of any of our repositories you need to update your local branch to main:

1. $ git branch -m master main
2. $ git fetch origin
3. $ git branch -u origin/main main

The Bootstrap Starter Theme has been updated to make use of Bootstrap 5 which has been released last week.

Changelog

• Bootstrap has been updated to the latest release v5.0.0
• jQuery is optional
• Support for older browsers has been dropped
• WordPress Coding Standard improvements
• Tested with WordPress v5.7

Download the Theme

Feel free to test out the new Starter Theme by downloading it using the Theme Generator:

Heads up: If you still want to develop with the legacy Bootstrap 4 build just select the old version in the Generator!

All sources can also be found on GitHub: https://github.com/them-es/themes-starter