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Keel: WordPress Theme Boilerplate Enhancements

Keel, my lightweight boilerplate for WordPress theme developers, got a handful of useful updates last week.

Including files

At the recommendation of Dan Biel, all scripts and styles are now included from the functions.php file. This makes managing your CSS and JavaScript easier because you can view it all in one spot. No more toggling between multiple files.

I also added hooks that let you inline snippets of CSS and JS. This is particularly useful for feature detection or if you’re doing critical rendering path enhancements.

Utility Methods

Keel also picked up a bunch of new utility methods:

  • You can now customize the length of the_excerpt(), and adjust the “read more” text.
  • There’s a temporary fix for some overzealous CSS injection by Jetpack.
  • There’s an option (off by default) to disable loop pagination and display all posts on a single page.
  • There’s an (also off by default) option to disable wpautop, which adds paragraphs and line breaks automatically to your content.
  • The wp_list_comments() method in comments.php now let’s you specify all comments types, just comments, just trackbacks, etc.

Accessibility

This is specific to integration with Kraken, but I added a .screen-reader-focusable class to the skip nav link for better accessibility.

Get Keel on GitHub.