How to Develop With the Crosswinds Framework

The Crosswinds Framework is an open-source WordPress theme, which means you are free to take this theme and customize the code to make it your own. You can always create a child theme to build on top of Crosswinds, but if you want to make a lot of customizations, you can essentially fork this theme.

If you don’t want to set up a fork here on GitHub, here’s how you can take Crosswinds and make it your own.

1. Create your own repository for your new theme through your preferred Git service.
2. Download the latest version of the Crosswinds Framework and place it in the local copy of your new repository.
3. In a terminal window, navigate to the theme directory and run npm install && composer install.
4. Add this repository as an upstream remote repository to your new repository.
5. When there are new updates to this theme, pull them into your repository.

The Crosswinds Framework comes with build tools to help you minify CSS, JavaScript and images as well as build the theme for production. You can use the following commands during the development and build process.

• gulp styles – compiles the CSS files and minifies the files.
• gulp editorStyles – compiles the editor CSS files and minifies the files.
• gulp scripts – compiles the JavaScript files and minifies the files.
• gulp images – minifies the image files.
• gulp watch – watches the files for any changes and runs any of the previous commands when there’s a change.
• npm run build – runs all of the Gulp scripts to build the theme inside the dev theme directory.
• npm run bundle – compiles all of the styles, scripts and images and creates a ZIP file with a bundled theme ready to be uploaded to a production website or to the WP Theme Directory.