I’m impatient, show me a Thematic demo first
I’ve always kept my eyes open for a fresh WordPress starter theme to use for my next custom theme project. In an ideal world I would always use the same template to begin with, and that template would be caste in silver and polished with gold, but let’s be honest here. I’ve used my fair share of starter themes, and have found myself moving from one to the next from project to project. Partially because I have the attention span of a goldfish, but also because I’ve never truly been satisfied with the themes I’ve tried. I’ve even spawned my own home grown theme, called Base, which we now routinely use in our WordPress CMS processes at Fresh Tilled Soil. I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Base theme, mostly because of the self worth that comes along with using it, but as always I have this inkling in the back of my head that we could be doing things better by harnessing the power of many, rather than just a few.
Child Themes for Modular Theme Developement
With this realization in mind I discovered Thematic, which boasts abilities way beyond our Base theme by harnessing the power of the open source crowd. Thematic will allow you to begin your next custom theme with a solid set of pre-built functions, styles and scripts that make the process faster and quality better. Thematic uses a feature of WordPress called child themes, which has been long since ignored since it’s addition to the core. Using child theme relationships you can keep your customizations separate from the original Thematic install, making maintenance and updates easier.
Thematic Features
A few features of Thematic that caught my eye include:
- Browser and OS body classes for realistic cross browser testing. Yes browser targeting is the devil, but let’s be realistic here; it’s unavoidable.
- A simple, well built, dynamic drop down menu that is automatically generated based on parent/child page relationships in WordPress.
- Pre-styled typography for that looks great in all browsers for virtually anything you can include in a post.
- Speed optimization
- Search engine optimizations
- Backed by a community, so it’s been through rigorous testing
- Extra widget-ready areas—13 in total and more possible in your Child Theme
- Various layout options for 2, or 3 column designs
- Fully compatible with popular WordPress plugins like All in One SEO & Platinum SEO
The Selling Point
The true selling point for me is the ability to differentiate your customized source code from the original downloaded Thematic code with a child theme. Let’s say you have 50 clients with custom themes setup as Thematic child themes, you could quickly and easily provide those clients with new features as newer versions of Thematic are rolled out, without harming any customizations. If for some reason a theme customization did break during an install, you can simply revert back to the working version of Thematic and report the issue to the community for support.
There are a few other WordPress theme frameworks out there, Thematic just happens to be the one that caught my eye. To mention a few:
I would love to hear some other opinions about the other options that exist, and why they may indeed be better. Please don’t hesistate to post your feedback.
About the Author
Kevin Leary is a web developer in Boston, MA specializing in enterprise website design and development, online marketing, and conversion optimization.
I love Thematic. Great basic template. Clean code … evergrowing child theme inspiration – and the developer seems like a pretty nice guy.
Perhaps other frameworks are better for people not wanting to really dig in and do something – those would be better off with straight foreward theme control panel.
Thanks for the feedback Bender,
I'm excited to here this as it's exactly what I've been looking for. The whole concept of using hooks in my themes is very appealing to me as well.
Hey Kevin. Great site. I found your article on Custom Write Panels and then got distracted by all your other content.
I'm not sure if you decided to stick with the Thematic Framework, but I've been doing about 80% of my development with it and love using it. My approach was to build a few base child themes that I'll use for different projects. For instance, if I need to build a site with a lot of theme options, I'll use this base child theme I developed.
A lot of the css and functions code also gets re-used from project to project. I've been posting a lot of my more useful filters. I'd be curious if you have any to add.
Hey Devin,
Lately I've been tinkering with the Hybrid theme by Justin Tadlock. I'm still undecided about which parent/child framework I may standardize. I like your Thematic Theme Options Panel article, that's a great idea. I almost see it as an area to define a "global custom field". Have you ever tried adding advanced fields in there, like a WYSIWYG?
I'm still a little turned off to the idea of using hooks and filters to edit XHTML code via PHP. I do a lot of customized CMS setups, and it's much quicker and easier to process if you just edit the XHTML code itself. I know the whole stigma behind keeping things independent of upgrades, but I haven't quite decided if it's worth all the extra effort.
Thanks again for the input, and keep up the nice work on your blog!
If you build a theme on a framework like thematic, can you sell your theme on premium theme sites like themeforest.net ? I assume its GPL . Wouldnt you have to change the names of the functions to something original ?