Raccoon Starter is a development-ready starter theme for modern content management system projects. It is designed for developers who want a structured, standards-compliant foundation that integrates contemporary build tools and dependency management. The theme is built with Composer for PHP packages, NPM for JavaScript packages, and uses Gulp for task automation, along with Babel for modern JavaScript (ES2015) and the Knacss CSS framework.

Modern Build Toolchain: It uses Composer for PHP dependency management and NPM for front-end packages, with Gulp automating tasks like compilation and watching files for changes. This setup provides a consistent and automated development workflow.

JSON Configuration Manifest: Theme features, support, navigation menus, and custom post types are configured through a central manifest.json file. This approach centralizes setup and reduces the need for scattered initialization functions in the code.

Enforced Coding Standards: The theme includes tooling to enforce PSR-2 coding standards for PHP and requires code documentation. A pre-commit test suite helps maintain code quality and consistency across the project.

Object-Oriented PHP Structure: The codebase is organized using object-oriented PHP principles with namespaces. It encourages developers to extend functionality by adding their own classes within a custom namespace, which is then autoloaded via Composer.

Integration Ready: It is designed to work seamlessly with advanced project structures like Bedrock, supporting environment-specific configurations for development, staging, and production. This makes it suitable for professional, team-based development workflows.