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Alcatraz is a flexible WordPress theme for designers and developers. It gives website builders everything they need to build modern custom web experiences.
This documentation covers all aspects of Alcatraz development.
Alcatraz is designed to be used as a parent theme and includes a number of utilities to help developers build powerful child themes. It takes primary inspiration from Underscores and the Genesis Framework, uses Sass, Bourbon and Neat to keep the CSS organized and modular, and Grunt to achieve optimized workflows that make child theme development fast and fun.
Underscores inspires the structure, conventions, and overall style of Alcatraz. Being the official starter theme maintained by Automattic, it establishes the standard and represents the accumulated wisdom and best practices from years of theme building, and serves as the rock solid foundation layer of Alcatraz.
The Genesis Framework inspires the hook system, extensibility, and developer orientation of Alcatraz. Genesis makes theme development awesome by allowing developers to easily add content to any part of the page without overriding an entire template. Alcatraz has a full collection of template hooks and uses them to include most of the default output, making it easy to add things, remove things, or move things around. This allows for extreme customization with minimal code, and the traditional system of template-overriding still works exactly as you'd expect.
Sass is supercharged CSS, and all of the CSS in Alcatraz is written in neatly organized SCSS files. This helps the CSS stay modular and allows Alcatraz to take advantage of the world of Sass libraries like Bourbon and Neat, which are used for the excellent mixins and grid system, respectively. Rather than include the parent theme's stylesheet you can pick from the list of individual SCSS files for specific components and only include the components you want, sending one built CSS file to the front end that is as small and simple as possible.
Grunt is the engine that powers the development workflows of Alcatraz. Grunt handles the Sass-to-CSS compiling, autoprefixing, JS validation, concatenation, minification, source map generation, live reload, translation file updating, and more. The included grunt watch task takes care of all of these things automatically every time a file is saved, allowing for theme development at lightning speed.
Together these frameworks and technologies make developing with Alcatraz a pleasure and give theme developers the ultimate starting point and toolkit for building world-class web experiences.