WP Remixx

I have been looking far and wide for the best examples of WordPress theming in recent months.  Many of you have probably been doing the same for a lot longer.  I am fortunate in that I have found an impossibly awesome theme, in fact a theme framework that has impressed me with its powerful approach to theming WordPress.

Out of the box, Thematic is sleek and beautiful.  It is based on a few precedent technologies, most notably the Sandbox theme foundation, and also Blueprint and Tripoli.  It pushes those great technologies to another level for the WordPress theme writer.  It is widget-ized to the hilt giving you the ability to plug in widgets all over the theme rather than just the sidebar like most do.

One of its finer aspects it that it is conceived as a framework, built for easy extensibility through the creation of child themes or “templates” as WordPress.org labels them.  If you haven’t explored that aspect of WordPress theme development, Thematic gives you the best platform I have seen for a jump point.

The author, Ian Stewart, of ThemeShaper.com, has done brilliant work on this framework and has been very generous in helping me explore its power.  The concept of child themes, and particularly how Thematic is built to espouse that technology is covered well at ThemeShaper and there is a lively group of people attending the forums there so you can gain a quick education on these powerful techniques, and this unique platform, straight from the source.

If you still write themes for WordPress like most do, either by hand from scratch or cutting and pasting fragments from other free themes and from WordPress.org Codex, you are missing out on a terrific set of concepts embodied in Thematic that will save you a lot of valuable time and help you produce very high quality themes to boot.  And incredibly, Thematic is free.   With so many poorly written premium themes out there that cost much more than they are worth, it exciting and refreshing to find something this strong that has been released as open source.

I highly recommend that you take a look at this terrific system.  Read the articles and tutorials there and explore the code.  Once you see, really see, the power of child theme building on top of a great foundation like Thematic, you will appreciate the leverage, the time savings and the quality that you will get for very little effort on your part.

To start your journey into Thematic click here.