Installation

Requirements

Barebones closely follows WordPress' default architecture and is therefore installed like a standard WordPress theme. The theme should be placed inside the WordPress wp-content/themes/ directory. You can name the folder according to your preferences.

Requirements

Before installing Barebones, make sure your project has:

  • a working WordPress installation
  • Node.js 24 or newer
  • npm
  • ACF or ACF Pro if using the custom block workflow

Install the theme

Clone the theme into the WordPress themes directory. Again, feel free to name the theme folder as you wish, we have used 'barebones' as an example below.

BASH
cd wp-content/themes
git clone https://github.com/benchmarkstudios/barebones.git barebones
cd barebones

The theme can then be activated in WordPress from Appearance > Themes.

Install dependencies

From the theme directory, install the frontend dependencies used by the Vite build process:

BASH
npm install

Run the development build

Use the development command while working on Sass, JavaScript, or block assets. This runs Vite in watch mode and recompiles assets when source files change.

BASH
npm run dev

Activate menus

Barebones registers two menu locations:

  • Header
  • Footer

After activating the theme, assign menus in Appearance > Menus. Additional menus can be registered in /includes/menus.php.

PHP
function barebones_register_nav_menus() {
    register_nav_menus([
        'header' => 'Header',
        'footer' => 'Footer',
    ]);
}

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'barebones_register_nav_menus', 0 );

Activate ACF

If your project uses custom blocks, make sure the Advanced Custom Fields plugin is active and up to date.

Barebones stores ACF field groups as local JSON in acf-json/. The ACF admin is hidden outside development environments to ensure field editing only happens locally.

To enable field editing, set the WordPress environment type to development by defining WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE within the project's wp-config.php.

PHP
define( 'WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE', 'development' );

Final checks

After setup, confirm that:

  • the theme is active in WordPress
  • npm install has completed successfully
  • npm run build runs successfully
  • frontend styles load from style.css
  • frontend scripts load from js/scripts.min.js
  • editor styles load from css/editor-styles.css
  • ACF is active if custom blocks are being used