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Kitchen Sink HTML5 Base WordPress Plugin

It has everything but the kitchen sink. An HTML5 Boilerplate base with sensible defaults for rapid WP development and normalization, all the basics every WordPress based blog/CMS (i.e. modern website) needs like contact forms, SEO and meta data control, a really helpful help file, useful widgets and shortcodes, and handy plugins guaranteed to work.

And since anyone can develop new themes and plugins based on (KST) Kitchen Sink HTML5 Base, the feature list will hopefully continue to grow as the stability and security continues to improve as the project matures.

Version 0.1

We are still wrapping development of 0.1 and so this page will likely be a mess and changed a lot in the coming weeks/months.

A little background

While converting my base development theme into a parent/child theme so that I could update existing clients with new features, bug fixes, and stability/security improvements I quickly realized why people decide to make a framework. Essentially that was what I was doing. Then as I was wrapping up what was to be version 0.4 of my base theme and I was writing some copy for the functions.php page docblock and style.css theme description I accidentally wrote, “…less like a parent theme than a plugin that acts like a theme.”

A light went on and I ripped the theme apart and dumped all the stuff I do for every theme into a crude plugin framework.

But then as I messed with the new plugin/theme framework relationship so many thoughts came to mind (bearing in mind that I am still relatively new to the WordPress community):

  • Will the WordPress community be into such an atypical setup?
  • Would WordPress.org even accept a plugin to the directory that worked like this?
  • Would WordPress.org accept themes to the directory that were dependent on a plugin?
  • Is there some reason that I haven’t heard of this concept before?
  • Would my agency clients accept this setup since it clearly references itself several times in the help file?

But then I realized regardless of the answers I didn’t care. My original base theme was just for me (even though I posted extensive documentation online) to rapidly develop custom client projects. I believed that this was the right way to go even if there would turn out to be caveats. So I persevered and put this together with the help of my friend Scragz.