Lessons Progress:

This isn’t the sort of theme you can put on an existing site, turn on, and have it work out of the box. We recommend using a clean installation of WordPress then importing posts from another site if you have them. Existing pages, or pages from the theme unit test file, will not be editable in the standard way once you turn on this theme.

Before we get to the theme, there are a couple of plugins you’ll need to install.

WordPress REST API

WP rest API v2 cover image

If you’ve been working your way through Zac’s video series you should be familiar with the WordPress REST API and how to make use of it. If you’re not familiar you’ll need to install a plugin to make use of the API.

Before you have the WordPress REST API plugin installed you can navigate to /wp-json/ and see some output but it isn’t enough to actually work with.

no wp-rest-api

  1. Download the WordPress REST API plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/rest-api/
  2. Log into your WordPress installation and head on over to Plugins โ†’ Add New
  3. Click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button
  4. Choose the .zip file you just downloaded then press ‘Install Now’
  5. Once the plugin has uploaded click ‘Activate Plugin’
  6. If everything is working properly, you should be able to navigate to /wp-json/ and see a lot more output!

with wp-rest-api

Modular Page Builder

The Feeling Restful theme won’t work properly without also installing Human Made’s Modular Page Builder plugin

  1. Download the Modular Page Builder pluginย https://github.com/humanmade/modular-page-builder
  2. Log into your WordPress installation and head on over to Plugins โ†’ Add New
  3. Click on the ‘Upload Plugin’ button
  4. Choose the .zip file you just downloaded then press ‘Install Now’
  5. Once the plugin has uploaded click ‘Activate Plugin’

Feeling Restful Theme

Before you turn on the Feeling Restful theme make sure the two plugins above are installed and activated.

feeling-restful-prerequisite-plugins

  1. Download Human Made’s FeelingRestful Theme https://github.com/humanmade/feelingrestful-theme
  2. Log into your WordPress installation and head on over to Appearance โ†’ Themes
  3. Click on ‘Add New’
  4. Click ‘Upload Theme’
  5. Click ‘Choose Theme’ and navigate to where you downloaded the theme then click ‘Install Now’
  6. Activate the theme
  7. When you view your site you’ll see nothing. Well, that won’t do! What are we missing? We have to ‘build’ the theme.
  8. Open up a terminal and navigate to where you’ve installed the theme
  9. Run the following commands:
    npm install
    grunt build
  10. If you don’t run grunt build you’ll get the most minimal, responsive website ever; a blank screen!
  11. After running grunt build you should have a website that looks like this:

feeling-restful-theme-initial

What you’ll also get are a whole bunch of pages that give you an error alert when you try to navigate to them because they don’t actually exist.

feeling restful page error

The only page that will work right out of the box is the ‘News’ page.

news

So how do we get the rest of the pages to work? How do we change the menus to show our pages? We’re going to have to customize the theme!