About

This theme is the product of a collaboration between University Marketing and the WiscWeb team at DoIT. It evolved from needs and demand that arose from the redesign of the wisc.edu site in January 2016. It represents more visual flexibility than the UW Theme Lite, all while adopting current best practices in WordPress theme development, as well as CSS, Javascript, HTML and accessibility. This theme offers a solid, responsive design solution out of the box.

The UW themes are copyrighted by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.

Using the theme

After downloading and unzipping the theme, install it in your site’s themes folder and activate through your admin dashboard.

Using a child theme

If you want to extend the theme, you should use a child theme. Do not edit the theme files themselves. If you do so, you will lose those changes when upgrading the theme in the future. See the WordPress documentation for Child Themes.

Customizing the theme options

Use WordPress’s Customize screen to set options for the theme. For more info on the options available, see the Sitewide Settings page.

Developing with the theme

Web developers who use the theme can work with it in a number of different ways:

As a child theme

As with any WordPress theme, you can create a child theme if you want to extend or override its functionality beyond what is possible using the theme customizer. See the WordPress documentation for Child Themes for documentation. The theme does provide a few hooks (see WordPress docs) that might be useful:

If you have suggestions for additional filters or action hooks, please contact us or consider contributing to the theme’s development (see below).

Customizing CSS

CSS customizations should be done within a child theme. The theme’s source code (not included with the zip download) includes the Sass files used to compile the theme’s CSS. If you’re working with the source code (see below), you can selectively compile in the theme’s source Sass as needed (including variables and a limited number of mixins). The theme’s source includes a Bower dependency for UW Style which is a set of Sass files and some Javascript that University Marketing is developing for use in any website or web app. This will be documented more in the future; for now, please direct questions to wordpress@umark.wisc.edu.

Getting the source code

The zip download includes only the files needed to run the theme. The theme’s source code is stored in the campus’s Gitlab service, which is maintained by DoIT. To clone or fork the project, login to git.doit.wisc.edu via Shibboleth and visit UW Theme. The project README file includes instructions for how to build a local development environment. The source code includes only the theme; you will need to download or compile WordPress core into your project in whatever way you prefer.

Contributing to the project

Reporting issues and requesting features

Please use the GitLab Issues tool inside the project to report issues and/or feature requests.

Contributing code

We welcome contributions to the code. To contribute, fork the repository, create a branch for your contribution, make and commit your code changes, push your branch to git.doit.wisc.edu and then make a merge request when you are ready. Please try to first submit an issue and let us know you’d like to work on it before submitting the merge request. Please keep merge requests as focused as possible. Let us know if you have questions by emailing wordpress@umark.wisc.edu.