Earlier this year it was predicted that theme frameworks were going to be the big thing on the block and with that came child-themes. As with anything, there are different view points as to what a WordPress themes should be, what frameworks should do, and how to modify themes. This has lead to some interesting ideas as to where themes in the WordPress community will go and made me consider that the current direction may be better than the old, but not without its problems.
WordPress themes use to be a collection of files that were created by a theme developers, then modified by others without the consideration of upgrades. Some people are still left in this mind set that modify core theme files is okay, only to find upgrades to be a pain. However, innovations have been made and problems changed, not solved.
This new way came as pair of ideas. The first being child-themes, which build off of and modify other themes without changing any of that themes code. The second is of course theme frameworks. These were two separate ideas, because they help two different groups of people, although, they did in part with the same tool, child-themes. The first idea was a way for anyone to modify their theme in a clean way. They second ideas was a way to speed up the development time of themes by providing a base. I my view, only one of these ideas was a good one. The other one was over kill and could lead to problems down the road.
The good idea was theme frameworks. While a basic theme can be build in minutes, a complete theme that is efficient and effective takes years to prefect. A lot of people forget about the non-essential pieces of a theme, such as internal SEO, microformats, and coding standards. The one overly inflated piece of a theme that no one forgets is design. Developers and designs should make design the only priority. Besides that fact that frameworks lead to better themes, they also speed up development time.
Now for the bad idea… modifying the design of a site with a child-theme. First off, you’re technically selecting another theme. It’s not a local modification, but effects the entire parent theme. It also groups all your modifications into one package, which does have some advantages, but also disadvantages. Most people make all their changes in one file, so once they want to remove one customization or change some values , it becomes tricky. It’s not hard put most modification in a theme, but then what happens to page templates. Well… they don’t need to be in a theme folder. PHP developers can either make page templates virtual or they can call them from other locations.
It’s not nice to shoot down ideas without suggesting better ones, so here’s mine. I think by that creating a plugin or having themes that allows the ability to customize a theme is the best bet for personal customizations to a site. This would allow for the manage of page templates outside of theme, whether through a database or some other folder location. Individual modifications would have their own file or could be kept in a Database, allowing for an easy way to remove or modify code.
Luckily WordPress is Open Source and the best solution, what ever that one is, will eventually win. I just hope that I don’t go down the wrong path, some what wasting my time.
WordPess Theme Modifications
Earlier this year it was predicted that theme frameworks were going to be the big thing on the block and with that came child-themes. As with anything, there are different view points as to what a WordPress themes should be, what frameworks should do, and how to modify themes. This has lead to some interesting ideas as to where themes in the WordPress community will go and made me consider that the current direction may be better than the old, but not without its problems.
WordPress themes use to be a collection of files that were created by a theme developers, then modified by others without the consideration of upgrades. Some people are still left in this mind set that modify core theme files is okay, only to find upgrades to be a pain. However, innovations have been made and problems changed, not solved.
This new way came as pair of ideas. The first being child-themes, which build off of and modify other themes without changing any of that themes code. The second is of course theme frameworks. These were two separate ideas, because they help two different groups of people, although, they did in part with the same tool, child-themes. The first idea was a way for anyone to modify their theme in a clean way. They second ideas was a way to speed up the development time of themes by providing a base. I my view, only one of these ideas was a good one. The other one was over kill and could lead to problems down the road.
The good idea was theme frameworks. While a basic theme can be build in minutes, a complete theme that is efficient and effective takes years to prefect. A lot of people forget about the non-essential pieces of a theme, such as internal SEO, microformats, and coding standards. The one overly inflated piece of a theme that no one forgets is design. Developers and designs should make design the only priority. Besides that fact that frameworks lead to better themes, they also speed up development time.
Now for the bad idea… modifying the design of a site with a child-theme. First off, you’re technically selecting another theme. It’s not a local modification, but effects the entire parent theme. It also groups all your modifications into one package, which does have some advantages, but also disadvantages. Most people make all their changes in one file, so once they want to remove one customization or change some values , it becomes tricky. It’s not hard put most modification in a theme, but then what happens to page templates. Well… they don’t need to be in a theme folder. PHP developers can either make page templates virtual or they can call them from other locations.
It’s not nice to shoot down ideas without suggesting better ones, so here’s mine. I think by that creating a plugin or having themes that allows the ability to customize a theme is the best bet for personal customizations to a site. This would allow for the manage of page templates outside of theme, whether through a database or some other folder location. Individual modifications would have their own file or could be kept in a Database, allowing for an easy way to remove or modify code.
Luckily WordPress is Open Source and the best solution, what ever that one is, will eventually win. I just hope that I don’t go down the wrong path, some what wasting my time.