Substrakt

A good foundation is the best way to start any project, that’s why a few months ago we started looking at how we could improve the default templates we use to build the majority of our sites. We decided to take the awesome WP-Blueprint and put it on a diet, compressing and combing the default stylesheets into a single lump. This made quite a bit of difference. Next we streamlined some of the JavaScript libraries that we used and looked at the fastest and easiest way to serve them up.

What we ended up with is Redprint a blank but incredibly fast WordPress template for building great sites.

• Redprint gets a an A Grade on all Client Side YSlow tests.
• It’s total size is only 52.5K on an empty cache.
• Uses sensible CSS defaults from Blueprint, so if your familar with these it’s very easy to get started.
• We’ve added in support for jQuery, SWFObject and all the hooks for Google Analytics, plus there’s a neatly defined functions.js to keep all of your jQuery out of the way.

We’ve been using Redprint in house for the past couple of months, now we’ve decide to open it up to outside contributors, this means that you can use the same superfast template that we do and share your modifications back with the rest of the world.

Visually Redprint isn’t anything special but under the hood it’s a well formed blank canvas ready for your theme to take shape.

To get started head over to Github and hit Download a copy.

If you’d like to get notified when the template is updated start Watching the project and finally if you’ve got ideas for additional features or would like to make some changes Fork the project and start hacking.

Enjoy!