Underscores is a no-frills WordPress starter theme engineered to give developers a clean, standards-based foundation for building custom themes. It provides semantic templates, accessibility-minded markup, and a minimal stylesheet that sets sensible defaults without imposing a visual identity. The codebase includes template tags, custom header and menu scaffolding, widget areas, and translation-ready strings to speed up common theme tasks. Its structure is intentionally opinionated about where code lives and how templates compose, which makes large customizations predictable and maintainable. Developers can opt into Sass and build helpers, but the theme is usable as a lightweight baseline even without a complex toolchain. Because it avoids design flourishes, Underscores encourages teams to layer their branding and components on top of a solid, well-documented skeleton that tracks WordPress best practices.
Features
- HTML5–based template hierarchy (header, footer, index, page, single, etc) with semantic markup
- Lean, minimal CSS to avoid interfering with custom design
- Custom template tags (in inc/template-tags.php) to reduce code duplication
- Custom header support / customizable header functionality (in inc/custom-header.php)
- Responsive navigation script (JavaScript) that toggles menus on small screens
- Sass / layout scaffolding (sample grid layouts in sass/layouts/) to kickstart layout work