One could argue that WordPress is fast becoming the MS Word of the Web — except that it’s open source and has approximately 1.5 kajillion contributors hammering out and sharing enhancements for free or cheap.

Recently, the Roots Theme has taken serious WP development a step forward by learning extensively from the HTML5 Boilerplate, cleaning up some unnecessary WP cruft, and riding on Twitter Bootstrap’s excellent LESS-CSS/JS front-end toolkit.

Working with Roots as its starting point, Aristeides Stathopoulos takes us yet another step along the path to world domination (or at least WP development bliss). His Shoestrap Theme — available as a standalone fork of Roots or as a Roots child theme — combines all the goodness we’ve known and loved in the Roots theme, plus …

Shoestrap adds:

• WordPress’s theme customizer, such as found in the Twenty Twelve theme, with controls for uploading a logo image, modifying the header and footer, setting the color of the navbar, selecting a Google web font, adding social links, and more.
• Additional layout options, with primary and secondary sidebars.
• lessphp baked in, enabling a developer to compile LESS live on an installed WP site. Enable the theme’s Developer Mode (a Shoestrap theme option), and phpless will check the theme’s Bootstrap-based LESS files and recompile them once you’ve saved edits to them.

Great, great stuff. Free, opensource, with the option to receive a free license for update notifcations when you download from the Shoestrap website. Also available on Github. (Thanks Aristeides.)

And of course Shoestrap has some nice free and premium plugins available as well.