WP Tavern’s Jukebox Podcast with Nathan Wrigley features Rob Ruiz, a designer-turned-developer who’s been working with WordPress since about 2010. Rob now works full-time at an agency while maintaining side projects, and he’s the current custodian of WP Rig — a free, open-source theme development toolkit and starter theme (wprig.io).
What is WP Rig?
– WP Rig is a minimal, opinionated theme development toolkit and starter theme that combines modern developer tooling with WordPress best practices. Think of it as a contemporary alternative to simple starter themes, but with Composer and Node integration, automated checks, and CSS and JS build tooling included.
– It ships with tools to enforce coding standards, compile future-facing CSS (PostCSS historically, now with faster tooling like esbuild/Lightning CSS), lint PHP/JS/CSS, and streamline developer workflows.
Rob’s involvement
– Rob discovered WP Rig while exploring theme frameworks, fell in love with its minimal, WordPress-aligned approach, and joined a maintainer call after seeing it on WP Tavern. Conversations with the previous maintainer led to Rob taking on the project and evolving it with contributors.
Who is WP Rig for?
– Developers who want to build custom, professional themes with modern workflows.
– Designers and hobbyists who want to learn how themes work and gradually move into development.
– Agencies and teams that need shared opinions, guardrails, and consistent standards across projects.
Why people choose it
– Minimal core: provides scaffolding without adding foreign templating paradigms that feel disconnected from WordPress.
– Modern CSS support: lets you use newer CSS features (e.g., nesting) via compilation, so you can write forward-looking CSS today.
– Team alignment: baked-in checks and standards reduce inconsistent practices across teams and improve code quality and maintainability.
Learning curve and use cases
– WP Rig assumes you develop locally (on your computer) rather than directly in a remote WP admin. It’s approachable because you can focus on one thing at a time:
– If you only want to tweak CSS, you can do that and keep things simple.
– If you want full control and custom functionality, the toolkit supports progressively more complex needs.
– The podcast emphasizes that coding provides “superpowers”: global, precise control over site output that page builders and admin-only workflows can’t always offer. But page builders are useful for getting started; WP Rig is for those who want to move beyond constraints.
Requirements and workflow
– Local development environment (LocalWP, Docker-based solutions, wp-env, etc.).
– Node.js (for JS build tools) and Composer (PHP package manager).
– Development happens on your machine; WP Rig bundles/builds a distributable theme you can deploy. The bundle process replaces WP Rig references with your theme’s name, producing a clean, standalone theme ready for distribution.
Full Site Editing (FSE) and blocks
– WP Rig started in the classic theme paradigm but now supports classic, hybrid/universal, and block-based themes. It includes commands to convert a WP Rig starter to a block or hybrid theme.
– Full site editing shifts some theme tasks into the admin UI, and while that can reduce the need to code everything, it also expands what themes can control. WP Rig enables theme-level block authoring when needed (useful for theme-specific blocks like custom navigation).
– Note: baking blocks into a theme can disqualify it from submission to the wordpress.org theme repository, so designers should decide if theme-level blocks are appropriate for their distribution plan.
Education and guardrails
– Rob positions WP Rig as an educational tool: it helps people “tinker” safely and learn correct practices over time.
– It includes automated standards and linting, such as the WordPress PHP Coding Standards (WPCS) via PHPCS. Those checks help developers catch issues before attempting repository submission or distribution, reducing back-and-forth rework.
– The project provides documentation, video tutorials, and examples to help developers learn modern front-end tooling in a WordPress context.
Project status and community
– After taking over maintenance, Rob significantly overhauled WP Rig (version 3) to modernize build tools and performance (moving away from older tooling like Gulp to faster alternatives).
– The contributor base has diminished since the original author no longer drives the same following, so Rob maintains most work with occasional contributors.
– There is an official Discord server and a YouTube channel linked from the site; GitHub hosts the code and contribution guides (CONTRIBUTING.md). Rob invites more contributors and users to join, try v3, and help grow the project.
Why contribute or use WP Rig?
– It encourages learning and contributions to the broader WordPress ecosystem, which the project’s health depends on.
– It supports multiple theme paradigms and modern toolchains while enforcing WordPress best practices.
– It’s free, open-source, and designed to make theme development more consistent, modern, and educational.
Where to find WP Rig and contact Rob
– Project: wprig.io (documentation, learn resources, contribute links).
– Rob is reachable via Discord (join through the site) and LinkedIn (responsive).
This episode is useful for anyone who wants to learn theme development, explore modern WordPress tooling, or contribute to an evolving open-source starter theme and toolkit.
