Generate your custom theme, install it in WordPress and run your first Tailwind builds
Generate your custom theme
The quickest way to get started with _tw is to simply head to this website’s homepage and generate a Tailwind-optimized WordPress theme.
The generator offers a number of options. These ones may not be self-explanatory:
- Theme Name: The name of your theme in title case, with or without spaces. If the theme slug and function prefix fields are both left blank, this field will be used to derive values for those fields.
- Theme Slug: A custom theme slug if the automatically generated one is not appropriate.
- Function Prefix: A custom function prefix if the automatically generated one is inappropriate (or, more often, too long). Please note that WordPress Coding Standards call for function prefixes of at least three characters.
All other fields provide metadata that will appear in the header comment at the beginning of the theme’s style.css file.
Move your theme into place
After unzipping your generated theme archive, you should move it into the correct folder.
The easiest and quickest way to get started is simply to move your generated theme folder into the wp-content/themes folder in your local development environment.
Depending on your requirements, you may want to move your generated theme folder elsewhere in your local environment and then create a symbolic link from the theme folder in your generated theme to wp-content/themes/[theme-slug].
Install Tailwind
Your first step before installing Tailwind is to install npm if you haven’t already. After that, open your terminal of choice, navigate to your generated theme folder and run:
npm installWith Tailwind now installed, you can then generate your style.css file by running:
npm run devThis creates a development build of your theme’s stylesheet.
Install additional tools
Your custom theme also includes tools for linting, code formatting and internationalization. To install them, navigate to your generated theme folder and run:
composer install