I’m like “The Bachelor” here with two final contestants and one in the wings: WordPress, Drupal and Umbraco. I started with WP, I am using it for this blog, but we’re only dating. I had another project, with greater scaling potential in the future, and felt limited by WP’s blog-centric model, and choose Drupal. I keep Umbraco sidelined as I love LAMP systems and Umbraco isn’t one of them but is a great solution for IIS/.NET CMS.
So while I’m not married to WP, one of my customers is. We installed a WP site and trained them on it, and now it’s time for site #2. Concurrently, I was wrapping a Drupal site and after a rather contentious learning curve, I now love using Drupal. My second Drupal project was remarkably quick to implement and I expect the third to be much smaller (but the slope of time compression will decline, of course). One of the things I love about Drupal is the Zen theme. Very well written and being open source, “sits on the shoulders of giants.” i.e., incorporates a lot of scenarios and design models seamlessly.
Here is some quickly assembled criteria for the theme:
- Open Source
- Actively maintained
- Comprehensive Support for WP 2.7
- Valid and semantic xHTML/CSS markup
- Not blog-centric in design
So, back to my WP-married customer, I need a Zen like theme for WP. This is a little out of the WP-think on the matter, but I’m finding a few:
- K2 (seems the most promising but is a repackaged Kubrick theme — and hence focused on blogging and not CMS?)
- Sandbox I like where it was born, but it looks like development stopped?
- Starkers (this post describes exactly what I’m looking for)
- Naked (has that darn word blog in it)
- (Update:) Blank Slate (again, what I’m looking for, claims that Starkers does not comprehensively support 2.7)
I continue to look, I’d love any ideas.
Have you looked at Thematic? http://themeshaper.com/thematic-for-wordpress/
I came across it the other day and am about to work with it now.
Thanks for the referral and the feedback. I’m definitely going to check it out. I just set up a new customer website with the blankSlate sci modification over the weekend, and it went very smoothly — albeit I need to make some adjustments.
If you’re looking for a theme that lets you make sub-themes (or in WordPress-speak, Child Themes) without messing unnecessarily with the core theme code I’d recommend Thematic. I’m a little biased though—I wrote it! :)
As a Drupal developer I love the Zen theme. I’m starting to get more and more wordpress theming projects. IMHO I have not found anything on WordPress which compares to the Zen theme framework in Drupal.
With that said, I’ve done two custom themes which are based off clients PSDs. I’ve used Thematic for one and Hybrid for the other. I felt that both frameworks were extremely overkill. I’m about ready to start a third project now and again looking around for theme framework. The only other option I’ve heard about is Thesis which you need to pay for, but from looking at the HTML output…i don’t think this is what I want either.
In my experience I much preferred Thematic as it had better documentation. Hybrid you need to pay for the documentation and it’s poor.
Thanks for writing Thematic Ian. It’s better than Hybrid and I may use it again.
Jordan