Support » Themes and Templates » Advanced Theme Development – Where to look?

  • I am an experienced developer, and I see the potential to develop a “super wordpress theme” that is extremely flexible and styleable. Since I think it’s a good idea, I assume someone has already thought of it and done it. But I haven’t found it yet, so I’m looking for pointers.

    Here is where my thoughts have taken me so far:

    – Extremely general, flexible design

    – Many options in the admin panel for things such as page structure (css layout vs tables, 1 column vs 2, fixed-width vs fluid, etc), style of lists, calendar style, options for everything, customizable text for everything. A big set of options.

    – A number of “skins” that would lay on top of the theme to define colors, fonts, background images, bullets, etc. But this would be separate from the options for structure, layout, and content. Of course, skins could be created by the developer, too.

    – Some necessary wrapper divs in the layout structure so that CSS could have all the control it really wants.

    – Classes for everything! Including putting classes on the html tag and every post wrapper div, for example. The html tag for a single post might have something like class=”single-post category-6 category-www year-2008 month-11 tag-slug author-mkruse random-6″ etc, etc. This would allow very specific CSS rules that would override the defaults and apply different colors, background images, etc based on any criteria I choose – WITHOUT resorting to editing the templates and putting is_category(), etc. And I wouldn’t have to put code into the templates to switch style sheets or anything odd like that (why show how to do that in examples rather than just applying a class to html and writing appropriate css rules?). The same kind of classes would go on the wrapper divs around posts so displays with multiple posts could style each post appropriately.

    – Configuration-based display of things like lists. Rather than hard-coding the display of categories into an ul, for example, let the user configure it in the options using templating like “[li][a href=”%category_url%”]%category_name[/a] (%category_count%)” or something to that effect. Then if I wanted to display it as a completely different structure, I could do so by modifying the little template snippet in the options.

    I’ve basically looked around at a number of themes, and most of them seem to be “all or nothing”. That is, you either take all their graphics, structure, and layout decisions as a package or you dig into the actual PHP source to customize things how you want.

    Why not make a “super” theme that would allow the user much more control over a number of options, then let the power of CSS take it from there?

    I see themes as two pieces – structure/layout and style. I see themes with colors and graphics I like, but not the structure I like. I see others with the structure I want, but not the style.

    It would be great to have a “super theme” handle all of the structure stuff and leave it as configurable to the blog owner, and let the “skins” handle the styling!

    Any thoughts?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • yeah thats all been done — more than once.

    heres one such implementation:

    http://diythemes.com/thesis/

    Thread Starter mkruse

    (@mkruse)

    Thesis looks impressive, but $87? Seems like the same could be done as a free theme. But I really do like its approach, and it may be worth the cash.

    Can you think of any other similar theme implementations?

    of course the same thing could be done as a free theme. But $87 for a theme is not a lot of money, and if you are developer than you ought to already know that. 🙂 (time IS money)

    Designing for wordpress is much more than just making a mockup in photoshop and putting in some HTML to match a pretty picture. You have to have at least a cursory knowledge of PHP to design a theme properly, unless you want to spend days on end reading through the docs and posting questions here.

    Additionally, creating a theme that is tweakable via the wp-admin area requires more PHP and specifically wordpress experience.

    Cathy Tibbles

    (@multitalentedmommy)

    I’ve used the WP Theme Kit before and found it to be a very good starting point. I found that some formats didn’t play well with IE, but with another IE style sheet, all is well.

    You want a theme framework for free? Check out Thematic by Ian Stewart and ThemeHybrid by Justin Tadlock. Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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