If you are looking to develop a single page application (SPA) theme with WordPress, you would find this project useful.

Build

This project uses Grunt (http://gruntjs.com/) to manage all the build tasks. The Gruntfile.js file is your entry point to the build. Dependencies are resolved using npm.

To build this theme, simply type the following in your command line:

% cd spa-wp-theme

(install dependencies, you only need to do it once)
% npm install

(run grunt to build the theme in the "target" directory)
% grunt

PHP

Each WordPress theme has a index.php file. Most of the magic, however, happens in the functions.php file. This project demonstrates the following techniques:

1. Using PHP Class to encapsulate the theme logic to avoid name collision.
2. Configure a proper URL (baseUrl) for RequireJS to load its dependencies. You will want to look at src/main/js/requirejs-config.js together with functions.php.
3. Using jQuery with RequireJS in a WordPress environment. The jQuery library is enqueued in functions.php and is detected to avoid duplicate loading in src/main/js/main.js file.

JavaScript

This project uses RequireJS (http://requirejs.org/) for code modularity. The application's entry point resides in src/main/js/app/entry.js. It is invoked by the RequireJS main JS file under src/main/js/main.js.

Currently, each individual JS file is dynamically loaded but you can easily change it to load the compiled JS (target/spa-wp-theme/js/compiled.js) by modifying the functions.php file.

For Unit Testing, QUnit (http://qunitjs.com/) is setup to run on every build. The test files are in src/test folder.

Templates/Handlebars

Handlebars has been chosen as the JavaScript template engine. You can see how the project uses the grunt-contrib-handlebars plugin to pre-compile the Handlebars files and how they are injected as dependencies by RequireJS in the src/main/js/app/screen/home.js file.

CSS/Sass

Compass (http://compass-style.org/) and Sass (http://sass-lang.com/) are used to bring some sanity to CSS authoring. The files are located in src/main/scss. They are configured to compile with Grunt on every build.

Last Words

I hope this project is helpful and gives you a idea of how to setup a Single Page Application WordPress theme. If you are interested in this theme, you may also be interested in some recent development on a JSON REST API for WordPress (https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API).

Most of the ideas/techniques are taken from people on the internet one way or the other. Please look at the References section below for where the credits are due.

References

[1] Loading conditional libraries in WordPress with RequireJS (http://dstrunk.com/loading-conditional-libraries-in-wordpress-with-requirejs/)

[2] Using requirejs in WordPress - wp_enqueue_scripts (requirejs/requirejs#622)