Hello! I’m getting into WordPress development and I’d like to get started with the best starter theme in the beginning, to learn it properly. I found Sage and it seems to be exactly what I’m looking for - modern, effective, powerful and active.
I read this article today, which claims Sage shouldn’t be ones first WordPress theme, and I’m wondering if that would be the case for all people? I have experience with HTML and CSS, and I understand the basics of PHP. I have also been playing around with child themes. Would I still have to “step back” from Sage and learn it from scratch, or would it be possible for me to jump into the deep waters immediately and learn through using Sage?
Sure, it’s definitely possible and maybe even easy for some people. We’re just setting expectations.
It’s more about the tooling that Sage uses: webpack, npm, eslint, etc. If you’re familiar with some of those, or don’t mind learning, then go ahead and try Sage first.
Wonderful to hear! The tooling is actually what attracted me to Sage, and I don’t mind a steeper learning curve to dive right into a more effective and fluid workflow.
The article is there because in so many ways it’s true, but if you’re good with the learning curve, you’ll be glad you learned it! I did that a long time ago and now I can’t go back to any other way
I must say I went back to playing with the loop with another theme, and I already miss parts of the workflow. Definitely jumping into Sage as soon as possible!
I am absolutely no stranger to those doubts and toughts
I do encourage you to give it a try and not just to Sage alone.
Start using and experiencing whole stack right now if you are motivated to learn new skills. You will be rewarded fast.
I did it from scratch with the help of Theme Development with Sage book and with full trust from day one starting with it.
I built not only my first ever custom multilingual WP theme with help of WPML/ACF plugins but did it as a real project for real customer and facing firm deadline It took me about 3 months in total to get this site up and live as it still is today … and for sure it needs total rewrite as there are many wp powers unused
This was extremely unwise endeavor that I was fully aware of, but I felt confident to go all in with the full dev stack after having launched my first Sage based theme with “gulp watch” task on MAMP local dev server.
The fun part is that I did also start from the ground 0 with all the tools at the same time that were all pretty much unknown to me:
cli / terminal / brew
git, github
json, bower, node / npm, gulp, browserify
sass / less (converted bootstrap3 less to sass manually) / autoprefixer
composer
ansible / vagrant - virtualbox / ssh and what not …
There is a lot to learn and there are even more things you need to cover and learn while i.e provisioning and deploying your site first time - but it is all worth it.
I am sure that learning and building with Roots is pretty much risk free investment and you will gain all those best practices, tools and skills in return.
Feel free to build your career on top of the reliable Roots combo if you wish. It is working for me almost full power now and I am learning and progressing every single day
with the help of 
and what not …