Alderman

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 that give the editorial team maximum amount of 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-tuned result of our site 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 too easy.

The front-end of all Alderman themes is built on Sass and jQuery, which is transpiled using Grunt. The back-end is built on PHP, while the APIs are built using Slim and Guzzle.