Howdy folks, just wanted to check in with a quick update as you may or may not have noticed a few minor changes here and there. That’s because I just updated my theme today.
Behind the scenes I upgraded from the Roots starter theme to Roots.io’s new Sage starter theme. If you hadn’t heard yet, Roots.io recently did some rebranding and re-named their starter theme from Roots to Sage when they upped the version to 8.0. The big changes, as a developer, is the workflow change from Grunt to Gulp, PHP5.4 is the new minimum requirement, and a re-organization of asset folders.
Learning Gulp over Grunt wasn’t too hard. And I even learned a new trick. I got Gulp to zip up my theme directory and save it properly as a theme zip for distribution (should I choose to do so).
As a reader, there aren’t too many visual changes. This is still based on the Twitter Bootstrap framework so structurally nothing changed except a few classes here and there. I did, however, tidy up a some loose ends with unstyled elements, made some adjustments to layouts on mobile and phone views. I took out a little of the “flare” in containers and instead am using more whitespace to separate elements, hoping to look a little cleaner and modern. There’s still a lot to work on including optimizing SPEED, download size and further tweaks to views on smaller devices. But those will wait for another day. I also have a big task I’ve put off to make a really nice gallery for my photography… one of these days…
If you happen to drop by, I’m always listening for feedback as this site is ALWAYS under construction :)