Why Ignition?
If the idea of using a ready-made theme makes you have nightmares. Or a visual builder tool causes you massive anxiety then ignition is for you!
Cookie cut themes seem fast and easy and work until they stab you in the back, repeatedly. When months down the road, huge changes are needed and this cookie-cut theme just cannot scale!
By making a theme yourself, you will always know the code inside out and the site can be customized to do anything! However making a theme from scratch every time can be time consuming and scary.
That’s where ignition comes in. Ignition tries to find a balance between being bare-bones and giving you just enough tools to get back to doing what you love!
The hard stuff taken care of
Ignition makes life easier for difficult items that can take hours to make.
Menus are one of those difficult things, especially with submenus and submenus of those submenus…
And then making all those menus go mobile. 😮
To save you time, ignition includes a nice menu with some options for type and placement. It even has a nice app-like mobile menu option. You’re still in control and can easily style it in the sass files or change it completely.
This is as cookie-cut as ignition gets.
Webpack, SASS and JS
ignition uses webpack to sassify, concatenate and minify all your files as well as let you write the latest javascript using babel.
Even better, webpack makes it easy to add javascript files without having to actually enqueue a lot of them into WordPress.
If you add a new js file that starts with an underscore it will automatically be added to custom.js which is already enqueued on the front end.
Ajax has also been localized and is ready for use.
Gutenberg Ready
ignition is gutenberg ready! It even allows for wide and full blocks -even when a sidebar is present! ignition is smartly made to handle all sorts of interesting layouts.
speaking of sidebars, ignition also includes the ability to have a sidebar that pulls in from the side! Yeah, its kinda cool.
Ignition has sections with ACF Pro!
Until you learn to use React and Gutenberg, ignition includes some nifty ACF block helpers. A flexible field called “sections”. Sections is similar to blocks but is built with ACF Pro and is extremely easy to use. Each section neatly uses a separate template file and you can make your own! ignition comes with a few sections to help you get started. There is also a header sections field, allowing you to have custom headers!
CSS Grid or Flexbox grid?
ignition makes it easy to use both!
ignition makes it easy to use both!
ignition simplifies the whole grid thing going on with css. It does away with surrounding items with div’s of columns and rows and makes it simple to have grids. ignition also has a card-grid which makes an easy responsive grid of similar sized items without any hassle. Check out the grid below and use your inspector to see how it works.
Class .grid uses CSS Grid with a fallback on flexbox for ie11. You can change the size of the items by editing the classes below. Try setting span-4 to span-8. All you need to do is make sure it adds up to 12.
Card grid uses CSS Grid to create responsive even sized cards. Span classes have no effect.
Flex Grid is almost the same as grid except it uses flexbox, and items can grow to fill extra space, even when the items don’t add up to 12.
Control Archive Pages from the back End
WordPress doesn’t have a way to edit an archive page from the back end. They can only be edited via archive-{post-type}.php template. Ignition changes this! You can choose a page to represent the archive and even output ignition sections including the loop of archive items! No need to make a separate PHP file for each post type archive.
And much more!
Roll Your Own Icons
Why install a huge library of icons when you plan on only using 10? ignition makes it easy to add your own set using icomoon.io. Simply replace the icons folder in the theme.
Add SVG Logo
Add an SVG Logo easily in the WP Customizer. It will appear inline so you can style it easily with CSS. It will also appear on the login page too.
Styles Ajax, Functions oh my!
CSS files for the editor and login are ready to be used. Ajax is set up with a nonce. Template functions for easy showing of taxonomies and images and more…
So Give ignition a try!
ignition was created by Eric Greenfield of SaltnPixels. It is loosely based on underscores and twenty seventeen.
Eric has been through code hell, and thus, has learned what to do to avoid it. If your life has been ruined by shortcodes, or horrible themes and plugins that refuse to uninstall, try using ignition!
Eric is a superhero who works hard to save the world from bad design and development, one website at a time.
When not being a hero, Eric removes his mask, and has downtime and uses it to hang out with family, and friends who know his true identity.