The perfect boilerplate

In my work (and I’d assume this applies to a lot of web designers and developers), I often have to make a decision: Do I

1. find a pre-built theme that’s close to my goal and only needs a bit of tweaking?
2. Build my theme from scratch, wrestling with the tedium of repeating the same work over and over again and hoping I get it right?
3. Start from a boilerplate that is ready for building on top of?

The first option is potentially the easiest, but you never know what seemingly inconsequential change is going to completely break it and cause hours of headaches. What’s more, it’s not even a choice if you can’t find one that suits your needs. On a limited budget? The theme you need could be expensive. And if you you don’t wanna give free advertising to the theme’s designer (many businesses don’t), you often need to resort to nasty hacks with hidden divs in CSS.

The second option is the most powerful and avoids many of the pitfalls of the first… but it’s really, really time consuming. The amount of work that gets duplicated from project to project can really balloon out of control, and the risk of errors goes way up when you have to manually type out that much PHP. It’s a workable solution, but far from ideal.

The third option, a boilerplate theme, seems ideal. The basics are in place, and all you’ve gotta deal with is CSS, right? Unfortunately, in my experience, this frequently isn’t the case. Even a typical boilerplate often makes assumptions about how you intend to use it, and will require the designer to install frameworks they don’t want before starting, significantly modify existing PHP for anything too far off the beaten path, and put up with a slower, bloated theme full of features their doesn’t need.

That’s why I love BlankSlate so much. It’s about as minimalistic as a boilerplate can get. It’s enough to get started if you only wanna deal with CSS and not PHP, but the PHP is simple enough that even someone who doesn’t know the language could, with relative ease, make modifications if they needed to… But you probably won’t need to. And if you do know PHP and want anything fancy, what’s already there is clear enough that additions are way easier than with other boilerplate themes I’ve used.

In short, BlankSlate is the ideal minimal boilerplate theme. It’s what I’ve needed for a long time. My only regret is that I didn’t find it sooner.