Building SiteOrigin themes

There are few steps necessary to prepare a theme for release on the WordPress.org plugin directory. We use Gulp to automate this.

Environment setup

1. Download and install Node.js and npm.
2. Install gulp using npm install -g gulp.
3. In the theme folder, ensure the theme-build repository has been added as a submodule in a folder called 'build' and is up to date. This can be done using git submodule add git@github.com:siteorigin/theme-build.git build
4. In a terminal, navigate to the build directory in the theme and run npm install
5. Get some coffee while npm installs the required packages.

Running builds

There are two build tasks, build:release and build:dev.

The release task performs the following subtasks:

1. Extracts the name of the theme from the parent directory into a variable called themeSlug.
2. Updates the version number in the functions.php and readme.txt files.
3. Compiles SASS files to CSS.
4. Minifies JavaScript files and adds a .min suffix.
5. Copies all files to a dist/{themeSlug} folder.
6. Creates a .zip archive with the appropriate filename ready for uploading to wordpress.org.

Release task usage:

gulp build:release -v version

Where version should be replaced with the required version number. For example, say the next version of the theme is 1.2.3:

gulp build:release -v 1.2.3

The dev build task only has one subtask:

1. Watch SASS files for changes and compile to CSS.

This is simply to avoid having to manually recompile SASS files while working on them.