Supposedly, they’re better than the default WordPress themes. That said, I’m in agreement with you – Twenty Twelve is an excellent framework, why pay for another?
Another great free framework is Underscores. It’s very bare bones, perfect for heavy modification.
It seems counter-productive for others to develop alternative themes to an open source platform. Why wouldn’t people contribute to the Core instead?
Off-topic, but I visited your website and Chrome gave me a warning that your SSL certificate is out-of-date.
On-topic, I think frameworks target niche use cases. For example, Underscores targets users wanting to put together their own theme without having to hand-code all of the standard theme files.
For paid frameworks, it’s their job to convince us that they’ll save us enough time to be worth the money. If you’re a professional developer and a framework would save you countless hours of work, it’s probably worth it.
I’m currently working on a theme, actually, and I started out using Underscores as the framework. But I was spending so much time re-writing parts of it to do what I wanted, that today I just scrapped it and started writing the whole thing by hand.
Thanks for the FYI about my certificate. Can you tell me what link you clicked that took you to the site? Our SSL expired and we just chose not to renew it but I thought I redireceted all our HTTPS traffic back to HTTP … guess not! 🙂
Those are all great points. Thanks for the input!
Your username, s3w47m88, is a link to your website (mine is too, so I guess this is a standard part of the forum), using https.
