At the core of the University of Virginia's central giving sites is Alderman: a highly customizable and powerful parent theme. At its base, Alderman Core provides an incredibly flexible admin interface with a core set of modular UI elements. These elements give the editorial team maximum versatility and ease of use when creating or editing new content, drastically decreasing turnaround time for creating new pages while ensuring creative freedom.
On the technical end, this theme is a carefully-considered result of our site's evolution. Using best practices in dependency management and performance optimization, Alderman is a powerhouse. Centralized modular elements within a core theme mean modification or feature expansion is a breeze. Useful shortcodes make SVG animations, mobile-ready background videos, and adding additional stylesheets or scripts almost effortless.
The frontend of all Alderman themes is built on Sass and jQuery, which is transpiled into common JavaScript using Grunt. The backend is built on PHP, while the APIs are built using Slim and Guzzle.
