Building a base theme for developers that scales

Themes are designed by designers for end users. In this process we somehow forget frontend developers that are doing actual implementation and equally important maintenance of themes later. Let’s see what we can do to make their life easier in this process. We will present to you how we build themes for clients of MD Systems, what tools we use and what workflows.

To support our workflows better we created and are maintaining the bs_base contributed theme with one of the most important goals of making a base theme that helps you in maintaining custom client themes after launch of client web site. In this session we will show you many benefits of this theme including:

• Using of a Bootstrap framework
• Easy to learn SASS/Gulp workflow
• SASS theme inheritance for child themes
• Powerful drush generator for child theme creation and updating
• Building a component library with the help of contrib Components! module
• Advanced Twig patterns - combining block and embed directives
• Many built in features in bs_base theme and companion bs_lib contrib module that you can reuse in your custom theme project.

Additionally we will discuss ideas and plans that we want to introduce in future major base theme releases.