My First WordPress Plug-in: HTML5 Boilerplate

My love affair with HTML5 Boilerplate has not dissipated a single bit over the (months?) since I first discovered it, but the Boilerplate: Starkers Theme I made turned out to have a slight short-coming: if you already had a theme, it was a pain in the butt to mush Boilerplate into it…

So, I made a plug-in that will do (most) it for you.  :-)
WordPress Repository: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html5-boilerplate/
Read More About It: https://aarontgrogg.com/html5boilerplate/hello-world/

The plug-in works just like every other WordPress plug-in: download it, unzip it, activate it, and put it to work.

From the Boilerplate Admin panel, you can add/remove all of the features that are pertinent to a WordPress installation, including the things you’d want to mush into your existing mark-up, like the HTML5 DOCTYPE, the IE-Conditional <html> tags, the new-and-improved character-encoding <meta>, etc.

I’m working on getting this added to the WordPress repository, but if I get even a fraction of the push-back I had to go through to get my theme up there, forget about it…  If there is any news in that direction, I’ll update this post.

Would love to hear what you have to say about this, anything missing, anything that could/should be done a different way, anything that’s breaking somewhere?

Thanks, and happy WordPressing,
Atg

4 Responses to My First WordPress Plug-in: HTML5 Boilerplate

  1. Priscilla says:

    Very excited to see your Boilerplate WP plugin. I recently installed the Bones theme on my MAMP Pro localhost. Very excited to be using it and getting the hang of things. Does this plugin do anything for those of us who are using Bones or Roots or is it for those who are using other themes with older doctypes, etc.? Thanks!

  2. aarontgrogg says:

    @Priscilla: Thx for the kudos, glad you liked the plugin.

    As for Bones, it appears that it already bakes in most of the goodness this plugin adds, though, of course, there are a few variations. There are things in Bones that this plugin doesn’t add, and vice-versa (my IE conditionals around the <html> are a little more robust than the standard HTML5 Boilerplate, but Bones adds a few more <meta> tags than my plugin does, etc.).

    The same goes for Roots, plus Roots offers CSS grid support that my plugin doesn’t touch…

    The real audience, I think, for this plugin, is people that already have a functioning theme, but want to add these features, without having to crack open the PHP files. If you are preparing to build a new site with a new theme, I would probably go with something that already has all this backed in.

    Cheers, and thanks again,
    Atg

  3. aarontgrogg says:

    Please note that there was a change in WP 3.3+ that breaks the order this Plugin loads JS files, including putting jQuery after the site-specific JS files, which of course doesn’t work so well…

    I’m working on a fix and will push to the WP Repository as soon as possible, sorry for the snag.

    In the mean time, I highly recommend to simply not upgrade to WP 3.3+ until this Plugin supports it.

    Cheers,
    Atg

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