tutorial on how to use underscores

  • Is there a good tutorial on how to use underscores? I chose underscores because it came recommended on the web and if twenty fourteen uses it then it must have something good going for it!
    The other main reason I used it was Lynda had a 6 hour tutorial, but I found his tutorial focused a lot on how to make the site he wanted to make and not quite as much as an overview of the different php pages for a more general use. I didn’t even see any segments on hooks, which I understand is a big part of underscores. After a couple hours in there I was more intimidated by wordpress themes than when I started.
    But I promised my client a custom website and I will deliver! Do any of you know of any good tutorials on how to use underscores? Something that says “So single.php is used for this and this and that case and here is an explanation of what <?php get_template_part( ‘content’, ‘single’ ); ?> means…” just something like that. I try to google underscores wordpress tutorials but I see lots of videos that give a brief overview of it and their opinions on it.
    Aside from this lynda series, I don’t see much for doc, honestly a text tutorial would probably be more helpful, so I can find the answers easily. The underscores site doesn’t exactly have much of an API or anything.
    Thank you all! I tried to see if this question was asked before but didn’t notice anything with this tag.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • Moderator Jose Castaneda

    (@jcastaneda)

    THEME COFFEE MONKEY

    I can’t really think of many tutorials for underscores. Then again I dive into code more than I probably should. It’s a great thing to get into once you get the hang of it.

    Have you read through the Theme Development codex page?

    Or you can read from themeshaper’s tutorial on how to create a WordPress theme.

    As for _s it’s more of a starting point rather than a theme. Think of it as a piece of modeling clay and you have to create a sculpture with it. ??

    Not to worry, the WP community is here to cure the stress. ??

    When it comes to documentation the best resource is the WP Codex:
    https://codex.www.ads-software.com/

    For example in your code above you mention “get_template_part”.
    Here is documentation: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/get_template_part

    Thread Starter shellwe

    (@shellwe)

    I did not catch the theme development page! I will check that out, also the tutorial may be good, it is nice to see how I can use features that underscores that others don’t have, like hooks (I understand bones and some other popular ones don’t use that).
    I know I can just google it when I know it is what I want but sometimes that’s the problem, I don’t. One example was trying to have a page where the user puts his content not on one spot, but in several spots all throughout the template, I read all of the page codex, and the page template codex, but come to find out what (I think) I needed was Custom Fields, had my friend not told me that I would have not known what it was called.
    I think my problem is I thought with the videos I could just dive in and be done in no time. I have a history in being a Drupal admin so the subtle nuances are jarring for me. I think that themeshapers tutorial will be a great start and I will just read through that and then start with a fresh copy of underscores.
    A quick question though, as underscores gets updates, would my theme have an update available where it would make changes to some of its core or do you just have that version when it is downloaded? I am not using underscores as a parent theme because everything I read says not to… so I am guessing not.

    Moderator Jose Castaneda

    (@jcastaneda)

    THEME COFFEE MONKEY

    Underscores updates but you won’t get a notice.

    A lot of themes base their themes from _s in the repo.

    The way you use the theme is entirely up to you. You can add/remove and style however you’d like. Like I said: It’s starting point.

    AMAZING TUTORIAL!
    https://www.lynda.com/underscores-tutorials/Adding-search-form/163092/177517-4.html

    Thread Starter shellwe

    (@shellwe)

    Thanks for the link iamdawn! Seeing this on lynda was what made me choose underscores, but as I went through it I found that 80 percent of it was just how to make his particular website, he was talking a lot about the css styling but things like making page templates and such he didn’t go into as much. I just found myself rushing through a lot of it at 2x speed. I hope to give it another shot soon.
    Today I was going through a 5 part underscores tutorial from buildwpyourself.com and its not bad. I found a good one on general wordpress template building on pluralsight, what was really wonderful about it is it named its chapters after each of the files. So if you had a question about footer.php, you could go to that.
    I am hoping to take something from each of this, I just wish the underscores site itself gave more information how to utilize it to the fullest.
    Another question, when you build an underscores site, do you clone the repository, or download a custom version from underscores.me?

    I found this great tutorial on underscores. Videos 3 and 4 were the most helpful to me, but the whole series is worth a watch, depending on your own knowledge of WP.

    Thread Starter shellwe

    (@shellwe)

    Mlsmith450,
    Thank you for this! I did watch these a few weeks back (at least the first two). I got nervous with the CSS one (2nd) because the only thing he did was start gutting out the CSS and rearranging… but I am using the SASS version so that shouldn’t be an issue. I didn’t notice until after that each video had categories.
    I will take a look through those and see if those are more helpful. I am not good at reverse engineering so seeing others complete sites doesn’t help me too much, and that’s a lot of what I have been finding.

    Same question, a few months later, the suggestion by mlsmith450 led me to an excellent tutorial at buildwpyourself.com.

    Thread Starter shellwe

    (@shellwe)

    jcartland, thanks you for responding!

    Yes, I got there as well, I looked on the buildwpyourself.com site and his intro to theme building was done with underscores. I need to finish his videos, I am on 3 now. It seems 1 was just getting underscores downloaded and 2 only touched CSS where he took out a ton of pieces, I am using the sass version anyway so that was an easier way to turn off stuff. 3 was very informative so far, just a lot of information overload.

    I need to go through the text tutorials on his site. I have a version of the website I made in regular HTML and just need to move the pieces over I get the idea of header footer, and page, but I am a little confused how traffic handling works… but most of that is just theme development overall, not specifically underscores.

    I’ve been working with the underscores theme for a class project. Only problem I seem to have is after creating new page templates, i.e. pages.php I still can’t find them in the attributes in my site. I go to my home page, select edit, and the attributes shows up, but no selection for the template, only the parent. Now if I go to quick edit I can see the template, but still only the default, not the others I created and saved and uploaded. They show in both my local and remote files, using dreamweaver for file management, editing, etc.

    I’ve watched a few videos here and followed everything.

    https://leveluptuts.com/tutorials/customizing-wordpress/12-starter-themes-intro-underscores

    Thread Starter shellwe

    (@shellwe)

    It doesn’t sound like that is an issue with underscores as much as it is general page development. It may help to post a new topic about it. I would guess there is something you need to set up in functions.php but at this point it is just the blind leading the blind.

    Hopefully by this weekend I will FINALLY move the site to WordPress and may come across a resolution to that issue.

    My problem is that I want to have my index page at:
    https://plantur39shampoo.nl/wp/

    But there I see nothing.

    I created:
    https://plantur39shampoo.nl/wp/index/

    and I can see it.
    How can I get this index page to show at /wp/ ?

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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