Alderman
A modular WordPress parent theme that powered UVA's giving sites and cut page turnaround time.
At the heart of the University of Virginia's central giving sites was Alderman, a customizable parent theme. Alderman gave editors an adaptable admin interface and a core set of modular UI elements to build pages from, which drastically cut the turnaround time for new pages and still left room for creative freedom.
On the technical side, the theme grew out of the site's evolution and followed best practices for dependency management and performance optimization. Because the modular elements lived in one core theme, changing or adding a feature meant doing it once. Shortcodes made it quick to drop SVG animations, mobile-ready background videos, and additional stylesheets or scripts into a page.
The frontend of every site built on Alderman was built with Sass and jQuery, with Grunt compiling the Sass into CSS and building the JavaScript. The backend ran on PHP, and the APIs were built with Slim and Guzzle.
