Why I Choose The Genesis Theme Framework

A while back I wrote about WordPress Theme Frameworks and whether you had taken a look at them yet. Today I’d love to share with you why I have used the Genesis Framework by StudioPress the last couple of months..

In my previous post on the topic I discussed the pros and cons and came to this conclusion:

For me personally, I’m all about options. I love working with a WordPress Theme Framework that allows me to have a very high level of control over how specific I want to be in what I want my theme to output. I don’t mind the learning, in fact I love learning, and when you know your way around the forums you’ll be able to either find what you were looking for or get a working answer of your fellow developers. Plus, having a Parent Theme that is continuously updated is big plus for me.

So even though you could argue a framework is bloat and adds a lot of stuff that you perhaps won’t ever need, to me that’s irrelevant because you only load what is needed and I could care less about how much kB the themes take up on the server.
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WordPress Frameworks, Have You Taken a Closer Look Yet?

StudioPressI’ve been working a lot with WordPress Theme Frameworks lately, most notably Genesis, Thematic and Hybrid, when developing themes. Well, child themes really. There are many reasons why working with child themes is a good way to start developing, but there are also some drawbacks. For me the good weighs out the bad in general, but there are situations where the old straight forward theme development method is just plain faster.

The Good

Building with child themes has a lot of powerful advantages. My favorite are:

  • Development Speed: Having an already working theme as a parent theme, a theme that already has been looked at from a lot of different angels as to what it should be able to do, and already some basic styling in place makes it a lot easier to quickly make some changes via the child theme style sheet.
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