I’m happy to announce the first minor release for the Mythic starter theme. Most of the new features have been planned for a while now, but we’ve had to wait until they were ready.

This release doesn’t have a lot of changes. It simply adds some awesome stuff. So, let’s get right down into it.

Laravel Mix 4

We’ve upgraded to version 4.0.14 of Laravel Mix. Mix is the build system that we use for Mythic. It’s a developer-friendly wrapper around Webpack, making configuration super simple.

Mix 4 includes some awesome speed improvements. If you’re running an old version of Mythic, check out the changeset for upgrading Mix for the couple of things that changed in the code (it’s not much).

WordPress theme review standards

Our PHP code lint command now utilizes the WordPress Theme Review Standards, a project that I’ve long wanted to integrate with.

I understand that not everyone has the same requirements for coding standards. If you’re not releasing themes on WordPress.org, you might want to go with a different standard. However, from a theme development perspective, I felt like this was the best course of action–settle on a standard that is required for WordPress.org themes while being useful for others. It’s a good default.

You can check your theme for issues using the following command.

npm run lint:php

If this is your first time running lint:php, you’ll likely see the following textdomain error.

ERROR | Missing $domain arg. | (WordPress.WP.I18n.MissingArgDomain)

Don’t worry about that. Textdomains are automatically added by running the i18n or i18n:textdomain commands.

WordPress.org readme.txt

Themes in the official WordPress theme directory are now required to have a readme.txt file included. Therefore, I’ve added a starter template for handling this. If you do not plan to release your theme on WordPress.org, you can safely remove this file.

Check out the readme formatting guide for information on setting this up.

Grab a copy of Mythic now

As always, Mythic is available via its GitHub repository. Please browse the readme for how to get started.

If you’re using Mythic for a theme project, please purchase a copy to help fund future development.