Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. I’m Nathan Wrigley. Today’s episode features Rob Ruiz, who’s been part of the WordPress ecosystem since around 2010. He began as a designer and over time became a developer, software engineer, and now an architect. He works full-time at an agency and takes on side projects independently.
Rob is the current custodian of WP Rig (wprig.io), a free, open source toolkit and starter theme for WordPress theme development. WP Rig provides a modern, minimal, best-practices-driven starting point, bundling Composer and Node integration, developer tools, coding standards checks, and support for future-facing CSS features via tools like PostCSS (historically) and modern bundlers. It’s designed to streamline workflows, enforce standards, and let developers use cutting-edge CSS and tooling today.
How Rob Got Involved
Rob discovered WP Rig while exploring theme frameworks. He liked its opinions, alignment with WordPress core, and built-in best-practice enforcement. After using it, he joined a community call when the project sought new maintainers. Conversations with the previous maintainer led to Rob taking stewardship of the project, which he now manages with a handful of contributors.
What WP Rig Is For
WP Rig is both a starter theme and a theme development framework. Think of it like underscores but with an integrated modern development toolkit. It scaffolds common files and folders, installs Node and Composer dependencies, and adds tools to help developers build robust themes. It’s aimed at people who want more control over their sites, learn how themes work under the hood, and adopt professional workflows—whether they’re building for clients or learning to develop.
Why WP Rig Stood Out
Rob appreciated WP Rig’s minimalism and its treatment of CSS. It lets developers use future CSS features (through compilation) and keeps the approach familiar to WordPress—no foreign templating languages. For agencies and teams, WP Rig provides shared opinions and guardrails that standardize coding practices across projects, making collaboration and code reviews easier.
Who It’s For: Designers, Page Builder Users, and Developers
WP Rig is useful for a range of people:
– Designers and those comfortable with CSS who want to build or customize themes.
– Developers building bespoke sites or working in teams who need a consistent, opinionated toolkit.
– Learners who want to transition from page-builder-only workflows to code-based control.
Rob emphasizes that WP Rig is approachable: you can focus on small aspects (like CSS tweaks) without mastering the entire toolchain. The learning curve exists, but you can take incremental steps—start with styles or a single template and grow from there.
Why Code Gives More Control
Rob contrasts code-based theme work with page builders. Page builders save configuration in the database and can limit global changes. With code, you can apply universal changes easily and immediately use new web features without waiting for builder or CMS updates. That makes building a theme from scratch satisfying and powerful, especially for those who want precise, unrestricted control.
What You Need to Use WP Rig
Development happens on your local machine. WP Rig requires:
– Node.js installed for frontend tooling.
– Composer for PHP package management.
– A local development environment (Local WP, Docker-based setups, wp-env, etc.).
You develop locally with automatic compilation (CSS, JS, TypeScript) and testing tools. When ready, WP Rig’s bundling process generates a deployment-ready theme, replacing WP Rig references with your theme’s name so the output looks like any standalone theme.
Full Site Editing, Blocks, and WP Rig
Full Site Editing (FSE) introduced a UI-driven paradigm for building and customizing themes using blocks and templates inside WordPress. Rob initially worried about how this would affect WP Rig, but he’s come to see it as an opportunity. WP Rig now supports multiple paradigms: classic themes, block-based themes, and hybrid/universal themes. You can convert a WP Rig project between modes via command-line commands that alter files and configuration.
WP Rig also supports block authoring at the theme level. While some argue blocks belong in plugins, there are valid cases for placing theme-specific blocks in the theme—navigation blocks tailored to a theme’s design are a common example. Note that bundling blocks into a theme can affect eligibility for the wordpress.org theme repository, so that’s a consideration when deciding where to place block code.
Education and Guardrails
Education is a core focus for WP Rig. The toolkit includes guardrails—linters, coding standards, and automated checks—that help developers follow WordPress best practices. For example, WP Rig integrates PHP CodeSniffer with the WordPress Coding Standards (WPCS) so you can validate PHP code against official standards before submission or distribution. Rob sees WP Rig as a way to help new developers learn, test themselves, and reduce frustrating rework when submitting themes for review.
Community and Project Status
When Rob adopted WP Rig, the project had a larger team. Over time many previous contributors moved on. Maintaining WP Rig requires knowledge beyond WordPress—for example, understanding modern tooling like esbuild, Lightning CSS, or Gulp—and that has narrowed the active contributor base. Rob is the primary maintainer now, supported by a few intermittent contributors. He’s overhauled the project (WP Rig v3) to use faster, leaner modern tools and added new features.
Rob is working to grow the community again. WP Rig has documentation, a Learn section with videos, and a Discord for the community. The GitHub repo includes contribution guidelines. Rob encourages people to join the Discord, raise issues, submit PRs, and help improve the project.
Getting Started and Contact
To explore WP Rig, visit wprig.io for docs, tutorials, and contribution info. Rob is active on LinkedIn and in the WP Rig Discord; he’s available to answer questions and help people get started.
Summary
WP Rig is a modern, minimal, opinionated theme development toolkit and starter theme that helps developers build custom WordPress themes while enforcing best practices. It supports classic, hybrid, and block-based paradigms, integrates modern frontend tooling, and provides educational resources and guardrails to help developers learn and contribute confidently. Rob Ruiz maintains and continues to evolve the project, and he invites the community to get involved.
