WordPress Theme Frameworks have exploded in popularity over the past few years with new ones joining the ranks almost on a monthly basis is would seem. WordPress Theme Frameworks are when all said and done basically starter WordPress themes that allow anyone to start developing their own WordPress theme on top of the chosen frameworks foundation and feature set.
Below are 15 of the most popular WordPress Theme Frameworks that will give you an idea of what systems are availabe to begin creating your own custom WordPress themes.
PageLines Drag & Drop WordPress Theme Framework – Price $197
Use PageLines Drag & Drop Framework and WordPress to build professional websites faster, easier and better than ever before. We absolutley love PageLines here at WPShock and you will too after you use it.
Headway Drag & Drop WordPress Theme Framework – Price $68
Headway Themes allows you to ceate your site with the original Drag and Drop framework for WordPress Build any layout you can think of, customize any page, add colors, fonts, and more; all with the power of the Headway Visual Editor. Great web design has never been faster or more flexible. Take full control over your WordPress site.
StudioPress Genesis WordPress Framework – Price $59
The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. Whether you’re a novice or advanced developer, Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.
Thesis WordPress Theme Framework – Price $87
Simply put, Thesis is powerful. It has a remarkably efficient HTML + CSS + PHP framework and easy-to-use controls that you can use to fine-tune each and every page of your site with a tactical precision that has never been possible before. The days of worrying about your in-site SEO are over—with Thesis, your strategy is “just add killer content.”
MultiToool WordPress Theme FrameWork – Price $45
The intuitive visual user interface makes designing WordPress Themes more flexible than ever before. MultiToool provides you with the ability to control every inch of your website without knowledge of any programming language. It goes without saying that you never need to touch any template files, because there are none in MultiToool. No worries, of course you can use external JavaScripts or StyleSheets, we have a file management built in for this.
Gantry WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Gantry was born when the RocketTheme development team wanted to consolidate their extensive set of custom WordPress template functionality into a simple, easy to use framework. However, RocketTheme wanted to ensure they didn’t lock theirselves into a rigid framework that would stifle the creativity and bleeding-edge design features that they had become known for. It had to be powerful enough to do everything their own templates already handled, but allow them to easily extend and build-on these features with a minimum of effort and complexity.
Hybrid Core WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Hybrid Core is a WordPress theme development framework for creating solid parent themes. It allows theme developers to forget about all the complex functionality and dive straight into coding their theme’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Whiteboard Responsive WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Whiteboard WordPress Framework is not like most other WordPress Theme Frameworks out there. While most other WordPress Theme Frameworks include a mess of styles, functions, and content areas that have to be cleaned out for nearly every project, Whiteboard remains a true WordPress Theme Framework. Whiteboard includes only the core WordPress structure and does not get fancy with unnecessary functions. While Whiteboard does include Less Framework and a minimal theme, these can be easily removed with the exclusion of a line of HTML each.
Ashford WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE & Premium
Ashford is developed to be as easy as possible to administer and packed with powerful features. Often themes look great in the screen shots or in demos, but are difficult to use in the real world. Ashford is the FREE parent to the fully featured Ashford Pro. The free version is loaded with features, but not all are enabled.
Roots HTML5 WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Roots is based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap from Twitter, and is hNews microformat ready. You get all of HTML5 Boilerplate’s markup (but we do place JavaScript in the header to avoid any plugin conflicts). You get most of HTML5 Boilerplate’s incredibly powerful .htaccess directly from the theme. You get all of HTML5 Boilerplate’s style.css.
Foundation WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Foundation is an easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device.
Reverie Responsive WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.
Skeleton Responsive WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Skeleton is a simple, responsive WordPress theme from Simple Themes. People visit your website from a variety of devices ranging from desktop computers, tablets, and smart phones. The average user spends only a few seconds before making a decision to stay on your site or not. Skeleton is a WordPress theme aimed at helping you build simple, uncluttered, useable, and mobile-friendly WordPress sites.
Bones WordPress Theme FrameWork – FREE
Bones is a wordpress theme framew that follows the mobile first approach that has a detailed + organized CSS, in-depth documentation with tutorials and details on every level. Bones is available classic design (Non Responsive) and a new fully responisve version.
WP Paintbrush WordPress Theme FrameWorks – FREE
WP Paintbrush is a new theme for WordPress, which comes with a built in editing panel, allowing anyone from beginners to advanced WordPress users to quickly create a unique and beautiful design for their website. WP Paintbrush makes it easy to redesign your site, even if you have zero knowledge of coding. If you want to change a background colour, try a different font, or match the design to that of your brand you can do it all with WP Paintbrush.
WordPress Theme Frameworks Conclusion
Although WordPress Theme Frameworks can speed up your WordPress Theme development time they can also stifle a true developers / designers creativity with their limitations. In my personal experience it will most likely take longer to create a truly custom theme using a WordPresss Theme Framework than coding it completely from scratch (If you possess the skills to do so). I have yet to see a WordPress Theme Framework child theme that dosent look limited in it’s apprearance or that has any real WOW factor.
This is not to say that WordPress Theme Frameworks are not useful tools which they are, The more complicated your projects requirements are however the less you may want to tie yourself into a particular framework.
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