hadron

Hadron is a WordPress theme starter kit—a pre-built foundation you use to create custom WordPress themes faster. Instead of building a theme from scratch, you start with this project, which bundles together proven tools and design patterns that take care of common tasks like styling, asset management, and browser testing.

The theme combines two popular open-source projects: Sage, a WordPress starter theme that handles the technical plumbing (like how stylesheets and scripts load), and Foundation for Sites, a CSS framework that gives you pre-designed, flexible components like buttons, navigation, forms, and grids. Think of it like getting a well-organized house blueprint instead of blank land—the structure is there, and you fill in the custom details. Under the hood, it uses a tool called gulp to automatically compile your code, optimize images, and refresh your browser as you work, which saves a lot of manual steps.

You'd use this if you're building custom WordPress sites and want a professional starting point. A freelance web designer might use it to speed up theme development for client projects. An agency building multiple WordPress sites could standardize on Hadron across projects. Even a small business owner building their own site with a developer could benefit, since the theme is designed to produce cleaner, more accessible HTML output (with features like ARIA roles for screen readers and microformat metadata). The README mentions you can also install a companion plugin called Soil to add extra niceties like cleaner WordPress code output and nicer URLs.

Getting started requires some command-line familiarity—you'll clone the repo, install Node.js dependencies, and run gulp to compile assets before activating the theme in WordPress. The documentation points you to Sage and Foundation's own guides for deeper learning, so the README itself just covers the Hadron-specific setup steps.