Kyle D. Skrinak

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.