Basecoat

Basecoat is a starter, not a theme you ship. It is a complete standalone block theme — theme.json, templates, parts, the editor styles — built so a new project begins from one consistent set of choices instead of a blank slate.

It is for building block themes on. The conventions it carries are the ones the other themes here follow, which is why it is the reference they are read against.

Compatibility

Requirements

• WordPress 6.8+ (tested up to 6.8)
• PHP 8.1+
• Version 2.0.1

Installation

Basecoat is a starting point, so it is used once per project rather than installed from a directory:

1. Copy this directory into wp-content/themes/ under the name the new site will use, and edit the Theme Name:, Text Domain: and version headers in style.css. Rename the text domain's .pot in languages/ to match.
2. Run composer install, npm install and bin/harness setup — see the Development section below.
3. Activate it.

To try it as it stands, copy the directory in and activate it: it needs no parent and nothing else installed.

Development

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+ · WordPress 6.8+ · Composer · Node.js LTS + npm
• Docker. Every command runs through bin/harness, which resolves the backend for you — DDEV first, then LocalWP, then the host. Nothing needs installing.

Setup

composer install
npm install
bin/harness setup   # one-time: dependencies and this project's toolchain

Key commands

Command	What it does
npm run test:all	every linter, and the suites the project has
npm run build:all	test:all, then the .pot, then the bundle
composer run verify:php	the pre-push gate: standards and static analysis
composer run verify:all	the same, plus the integration suite where the project has one
composer run lint:wpcs / npm run lint / npm run lint:css	WPCS, ESLint, Stylelint — the :fix variants rewrite
composer run lint:pcp	Plugin Check, where the project ships through WordPress.org
composer run make:pot	regenerate languages/basecoat.pot
npm run zip	the distributable archive

Tests. This project is a theme, and the harness carries no test layer for themes: test, integration, coverage, mutation, counterfactual, test:js, and e2e each print one sentence and exit 0. A tests/ directory the project already has stays in its repository and is not run; lint, the build and the hooks are unchanged.

Assets: npm start to watch, npm run build for a one-shot bundle.

Anything without a script above goes through the runtime directly:

bin/harness doctor          # backend, tools, graft, manifest — run this first
bin/harness help            # every command

Never call php, composer, node, npm or wp directly. The backend is resolved per project, and a direct call fails in a way that looks like a broken project rather than a missing environment.

Support & Contribution

Basecoat is developed in this repository. Read AGENTS.md first — it carries the project facts, the conventions and the gates, and it is where the block-theme shape is written down for the themes built from this one.