Comments on: Why I don’t like WordPress child themes and frameworks. Don’t be angry.

By: Rebecca Gill

Rebecca Gill — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:17:20 +0000

This is a good read, even though I totally disagree. But diversity is that brings excellence.

I’m a huge advocate of Genesis and the StudioPress theme. I moved to Genesis and pushed our firm into creating custom child themes because I was tired of massive themes with too many options and/or really bad coders hacking the standard WP themes. But I look at it from a firm standpoint and a business owner who has multiple coders working in tangent on projects or with clients over time. The framework gives them a box to play in and rules to follow. Genesis does a great job of that.

I think the point of security is important. We’ve built a ton of Genesis sites and not once have they been hacked. Their fast, secure, and the clients can manage them moving forward. All reasons why I love WordPress and Genesis.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:01:12 +0000

“If the concept itself is flawed then where does all the happy rage come from?”
Really? All I can find is affiliate link reviews for any theme framework I have looked up. All the happy rage is the money made from clicks (Yes, I know it is not much). I think they suck to no end because WP itself is highly functional if you actually know how to use it, I find that frameworks break the uses of WP and overly complicate the system, add extra code, etc. All this impacts the load time of the site, and with the new Panda update, that will negatively impact SEO.

By: AfroDutch

AfroDutch — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:46:31 +0000

Interesting post i must say. I have read much rave about child themes and have been contemplating on working with them. This post has made it clear that apart from all the wonderful reviews, there are also the cons to consider. I would need to do much research in order to see my options then. Thanks for posting.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:40:24 +0000

I recently updated a theme and all of my customizations were stripped away. I’m pretty new to wp so when I heard about child themes and all the good that they could do naturally I wanted to know the cons as well. Right now I confused, maybe I should not update my themes at all or at least until I learn a little more about how stuff works. Thanks for the advice, it has been really helpfull.

By: Bob Schecter

Bob Schecter — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:32:46 +0000

The reason you don’t like child themes or themeframes is because you understand all of the garbledygook that is WordPress. Justin, Ipstenu, etal, can write books on it.But for us, who are just looking for something that makes a theme more personal, they’re a godsend. Child themes enable us newbies who, as Justin notes, dread the impending updates, sneak in a few css tweaks. That is assuming the theme lends itself to them as some have so much built into their coding as to preclude a child theme in some instances. And the themeframes sorta level the playing field a bit, as we, those of us more code-challenged, can squeeze some rather elegant and personal themes out of WordPress without having to cross over to the dark side. My guess is that WordPress greater audience is apt to embrace both techniques while developers are loathe to accept them.

By: elmalak

elmalak — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:45:16 +0000

I agree with you that sometimes you need to do a lot of work with child themes to overcome a very simple thing.
The main point I face this is when editing the header.php file for twentyten, it’s got too much code that I usually don’t need.

But in general I find it more time saving that creating themes from scratch or using blank themes like Blank theme or Starkers theme, which take a lot of time to get everything to look right.
So, what’s your favorite way for creating themes then?

By: Neil Stoker

Neil Stoker — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 22:03:02 +0000

I’m a relative newbie; for me, child themes have been great. I install a theme, and there is always something I don’t like. I installed a new site yesterday using a new theme, and immediately removed / altered some elements using CSS – much tidier in a child. And sometimes when I start, I have no idea whether I am going to make big or small changes; am I going to ditch the theme the next day? Or (as sometimes happens) will I use a particular theme on multiple sites, but with different changes? Or (as has happened) will I restore aspects of a theme that I initially didn’t want?

The best thing, I think, is that it really helps me to keep my changes separate from the parent theme. Hacking into a theme is a very messy thing to track, especially if you change your mind, or you want to repeat some of the actions in another child. Clarity must be a good thing?

Hooks and filters I struggle with just from technical understanding - I have been introduced to them using Justin’s Prototype theme, and I have found it hard to track down what’s going on where, but hacking the parent is still not the answer.

By: Nathan B

Nathan B — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:55:49 +0000

Wait, doesn’t the conflation of theme frameworks and parent themes come directly from the WP Codex?
>>>A Theme framework is a Theme designed to be a flexible foundation for quicker WordPress development, usually serving as a robust Parent Theme for Child Themes.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Frameworks

By: Nathan B

Nathan B — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:49:08 +0000

I totally agree, Rebecca. I jumped into frameworks thinking they would make life easier, but they made life harder, because all non-CSS changes had to be done in PHP in functions.php . Implementing and troubleshooting those was a nightmare for a non-programmer like me. My conclusion: I thought frameworks would be good for dumb people, but they’re only good for smart people.

By: Oren

Oren — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 23:54:32 +0000

I strongly agree with you. I always thought I’m the only one…