Free “Starkers” Theme, a Wordpress Foundation

Another tip of the hat to Elliot Jay Stocks, he has release quite possibly to most useful download I have come across in months. With the release of the “Starkers” theme Elliot has created the foundation that we designers need to quickly develop custom Wordpress themes. By removing all of the unnecessary code found within the basic Wordpress theme the process of starting from scratch is now infinitely easier. In addition our code will be extremely cleaner, and much easier to debug. I applaud Elliot for releasing the very thing that every Wordpress designer has dreamed of since they first time they touched a style.css file. Elliot sums up his motivation to create a template that we could use to speed up our development:

It dawned on me the other day that this is an incredibly laborious process and it was about time I did something about it. Wordpress is an incredibly well-written blogging engine and its standards-centric build is great, but it’s still full of markup that just doesn’t need to be there. It’s time to discard the robes and get naked!

For the full details, a feature list, and to download the template proceed to Elliot’s Blog.