WP Rig: My Love Letter to the WordPress Community

What if we could use the power of WordPress to move the web forward?

About a month ago my wife Angela and I spent hours sketching logos on scraps of paper while our toddler distributed all his toys evenly throughout our living room. The final logo, which you can see in the image above, was not only the culmination of five months of work, but a mile marker on a journey that started 12 years ago when I created my first WordPress site.

Let me introduce you to WP Rig, my answer to the question at the top of this article and LinkedIn Learning’s first major contribution to the WordPress project.

I believe in WordPress as a vehicle of change on the web.

What is WP Rig? In short, it is the vehicle I believe the WordPress community needs to not just power 30% of the web but actively drive the web forward. WP Rig is an evolution on the tried and true starter theme model: a modern build process and WordPress starter theme bundled together, created to simplify the process of building advanced, accessible, performant, progressive themes. WP Rig does the heavy lifting of optimization so developers can focus on what they do best: designing and building great user experiences. It provides a unified build process promoting the latest performance best practices, and a starter theme that rethinks how WordPress themes are built and what they should do. In short, it’s a development rig built to let developers harness the winds of the web and control where they take us.

At its core, WP Rig is strongly opinionated toward accessibility and performance: build a theme with WP Rig and much of the complexity of writing accessible markup and optimizing your code for performance is taken off your hands. And this is for a reason: I believe the responsibility of creating an accessible and performant web lies at the hands of its designers and developers. The onus should not be on the individual WordPress user to know to install minification plugins and activate lazy-loading scripts. Themes (and eventually WordPress) should do these things out of the box. So that’s what WP Rig does.

While I was the lead developer on this project, it is not my work alone. The WP Rig project was inspired by a conversation I had with Google Developer Advocate Alberto Medina at WordCamp US 2017, and developed in collaboration with Google, XWP, and members of the WordPress community including Rachel Cherry (who has signed on as a WP Rig maintainer). My time in working on the project was donated by LinkedIn Learning, and to show our continuing support of WP Rig we have created a free course called WordPress: Building Progressive Themes with WP Rig which right now is being translated to French, German, and Spanish (all of which will also be free).

I believe in WordPress as a vehicle of change on the web, and that belief is shared by my colleagues at LinkedIn Learning and my collaborators at Google, XWP, and in the WordPress community. WP Rig is a community project, beholden to no company or product other than the web. It is for the community, by the community, and I want you to feel as much ownership of it as I do.

WordPress was built on collaboration and contribution for a greater purpose. I invite you to join the WP Rig project by using it to build progressive themes, submitting issues and feature requests, contributing code and documentation, and by thinking about how we can build a better web through the power of WordPress. Contributions welcome.

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is the creator of WP Rig, a contributor to the WordPress open source project, and a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) focusing on front-end web development and, of course, WordPress.