About the Willamette Project
Hey folks, 🙋🏻♂️ Jared here (🔗 Personal / Web Studio / Mastodon), founder & lead maintainer of the Ruby-based Bridgetown web framework. I’m writing this in the first-person, rather than attempt to be all buttoned-up and “professional”…just easier that way. 😉
The history of Willamette is really bound up in the history of trying to collect all of the best practices and frontend techniques I’ve come across or developed organically over roughly a decade of building “static sites” using Jekyll or Bridgetown. I wanted something I would be excited to use myself for most new content projects to help get started super quickly, and then hopefully it would be helpful for others as well. The goal is to offer a capable, flexible foundation that is extremely future-proof, now that we’ve reached a place where “vanilla web development” has reached a state of sophistication & maturity.
Willamette is currently in public beta. We’ll declare an official “1.0” once we feel the level of spit’n’polish is right where it needs to be.
I had also grown frustrated that a “themes marketplace” hadn’t really emerged yet for Bridgetown, and in large part that felt like totally my own fault. Hard to build a world-class third-party theme when there’s no good first-party theme to learn from and be inspired by. Truly, the best outcome would be if a whole bunch of folks hard-fork Willamette and then take it in totally new directions to create new themes and variations of themes. Then perhaps a few newcomers will end up learning a little bit about Ruby and other concepts we care about in the Bridgetown ecosystem simply because they wanted to take advantage of a really cool specialized theme they heard about.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a massive shout out to the gracious generosity of the Gem Fellowship. Winning one of the 2026 grants to fund the time to dial this theme in on a whole variety of levels has been a total game-changer. A huge thank you to Gem Fellowship and to all those who fund independent & open source software. 🙏
Willamette also benefits from good timing…specifically, the emergence of Web Awesome. For quite some time, its predecessor Shoelace had been the gold standard for a component library based on web standards (aka custom elements) and not a “proprietary” component model for a specific JS framework. We were such fans of Shoelace within the Bridgetown team, we even built an automation so you could set up Shoelace for a new Bridgetown site in seconds.
But Shoelace suffered from missing a bunch of connective tissue to the concept of a robust “CSS framework”. Yes, Shoelace gave you buttons and dialogs and tabs, but you couldn’t do much else in terms of fleshing out whole layouts and templates and content patterns and comprehensive design systems. For that, you’d have to reach for other tools already out there, from Open Props to Pico to even old-school CSS frameworks like Bulma.
Enter Web Awesome, the successor to Shoelace. In a very real sense, it does it all. It’s not hyperbole to say you can start out with <body></body>, add Web Awesome, build out your layouts and templates and content patterns etc. etc. using the design system building blocks Web Awesome gives you, and your job is done.
It’s the promise of past will-do-it-all toolkits such as Bootstrap—only this time you’re able to use something built from the ground up to take full advantage of modern web standards and all the future-proof benefits thereof.
Willamette is in a sense a “Web Awesome theme”, stacking opinionated design features and Bridgetown content structures on top of that rock-solid foundation.
🤲 The Future of Willamette… #
…is in your hands! It started out as a theme specifically for blogs, technical documentation, and mild ventures into portfolios and related content marketing. But we want Willamette to be a great starter kit for a variety of use cases.
- More page layouts.
- More preset color and font options to choose from.
- More customizable content features.
- Add-ons to provide visual pizazz like animation, 3D iconography, photo/video grids, landing page building blocks, e-commerce UI, etc.
Your feedback, ideas, and contributions are absolutely vital to ensuring the future success of Willamette!
And of course, your donations are gladly welcomed and support the ongoing evolution and maintenance of the Willamette project.