Working With WordPress Frameworks

WordPress themes breathe life into your blog, they are the personality of your website. The aesthetic and load time of your website will influence visitors within a few seconds of seeing the page. WordPress frameworks are designed to let amateurs jump into a theme and whip up customizable templates. Frameworks are like sheets of blank grid paper: it’s easy to plot out what you want, but you work with only the bare essentials.

WordPress Frameworks

You’ll need to know a bit about Photoshop to assist in asset creation, but Thematic is an excellent place for any amateur coder to start working with WordPress.

Widgets

In WordPress, widgets are customizable areas that serve different functions. Widgets can show your Facebook friends list, contain links for your blogroll, or display staff photos.. Thematic’s 13 widget areas are easily customizable and the framework is constantly updated to be compatible with the most recent versions of WordPress. You can also completely alter your navigation (including creating or disabling drop-down menus). A good framework has many widget areas, including the sidebar and navigation area, that you can customize.

SEO

Optimizing the content of your blog with tags and categories helps index your website, but it does not optimize your content and code. Thematic is coded with an emphasis on content, and the code itself is easy to work with. Comment tags mark different elements you can manipulate, and you can add your favorite SEO plugin to Thematic for the extra boost. Thematic also loads quickly, which is another quality you should look for in a good framework.  On Brand.com‘s Facebook page you can find some advice on how to improve your SEO for branding purposes including why you should do a thorough evaluation of your site for broken links and look for ways to improve the anchor text of your links. (Hint: this can help improve your image as a subject matter expert and keep the clients coming back for more.)

Coding and Support

Thematic users construct a child theme, which looks to the files of the original Thematic theme, and renders those with some changes that you apply to them. You can use Thematic without a child theme, but you will be altering the source files directly, and this is a theme you might break a few times. With a few lines of PHP, you can cut out Meta data about comments posted, or change how the timestamp works for each article.

The community for Thematic is robust and full of moderators that are willing to help developers new and old. The blog updates with release information, tips, and ideas for how to implement common elements and maintain Thematic’s speed.

Other Frameworks

Carrington is a robust content management system that helps create themes. Billed as a “theming platform,” Carrington uses your naming convention to create fully functioning themes based on the core functionality. Roots is another WordPress framework that focuses on clean code output and forcing the user to write less code over all.

Frameworks are bare bones packages, but they include certain functionality that is not standard in all WordPress themes. For example, Thematic allows users to design custom fields and then hook them to the theme with “get_field.” Other hooks like “thematic_header” allow for branding and customization options without ever altering the source file.

Tips

If you incorporate images into your design, be sure that they can be viewed in low resolution to speed up load times. Thumbnails work well for blogs, and resizing a picture to fit the dimensions of sliding galleries will help decrease page loading as well. W3 Total Cache is an excellent plugin to analyze and reduce load times for your blog. Tinkering with a framework takes longer than working with a free WordPress theme, but you have much more control over personalizing your blog.

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