The Roots theme is a very clean WordPress Bootstrap theme framework that combines two popular open-source ecosystems, WordPress and Bootstrap, in a very natural way. This site itself was built on Roots 7. Soon, Roots was about to enter a new era: Roots 8.0. The major changes in Roots 8.0 are outlined below.
The Roots theme was renamed to Sage
Sage requires at least PHP 5.4, which was a somewhat aggressive move at the time, especially considering how many hosts still ran PHP 5.2. But the upgrade was worth it. The shorthand echo syntax and array syntax introduced in PHP 5.4 greatly simplified our code.
The front-end build tool moved from Grunt to Gulp
Some people said that switching from Grunt to Gulp felt like returning to the modern era. Sage already defines the Gulp tasks for us, so we only need to use them. The available tasks are:
gulp— compile and optimize files in theassetsdirectory, mainly LESS, JavaScript, and images.gulp watch— recompile when files inassetschange.gulp --production— buildassetsfor production with no source maps.gulp --tasks— list all available tasks.
Framework agnosticism: Sage was no longer only a WordPress Bootstrap framework
The most revolutionary change in Sage compared with earlier versions was that it became framework-agnostic. It no longer required Bootstrap as the front-end framework for the theme. We could also use frameworks such as Pure or UIkit.
The theme activation settings were removed
Anyone who used earlier Roots themes will remember the activation settings screen that could generate a static front page, configure permalink structure, and so on. Those options were clearly not needed by everyone, and for developers who were not familiar with the framework they could even cause confusion. To simplify the workflow, Sage removed that feature.
