Category: Philosophy

Rampart: A WordPress Theme for Developers

January 23, 2014

I’ve been building, modifying, using, and studying WordPress themes for over five years now. I remember watching the release of the first few commercial WordPress themes. As time went on, I ended up working for and with a number of different theme companies. I worked on various client projects as well. I’ve spent countless hours working with themes both good and bad. Now the time has finally come for me to put my experience into the form of a product: the Rampart WordPress theme.

Please note: Rampart will be a commercial theme, and is not available yet. There will be discounts for developers interested in purchasing the theme before it officially launches. To be the first to find out when these deals are available, please sign up for the Theme Foundation newsletter.

A Theme for Developers Only

If you’re not a web developer, you can stop reading now. This theme is not for you. It will not have a thousand theme options, it will not have a slider, and it will not be advertised with the phrase “without any code.”

If you are a web developer, I want to help you build higher quality sites in less time. Here’s the plan… (more…)

The Best Things in Life are not Drag-and-Drop

July 12, 2013

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the philosophy behind WordPress theming. It seems that the prevailing attitude is to make things easier than ever before. We want to enable the masses to create and manage their own websites. This sounds like a noble goal, but is it really really a good idea?

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Responsive Navigation Menus: Flexible Solutions

June 17, 2013

How do you build a mobile-first, progressively enhanced, responsive navigation menu? Let me introduce you to Menu Object (mo.js), a system for handling menus from the ground up. At its most basic level, mo.js dynamically adds and removes classes from menu elements to allow various menu states to be styled using CSS. For those of you dying to get right to the code, you can check out the Menu Object repository on Github. For everyone else, let’s start at the beginning…

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Responsive Navigation Menus: Problems and Proposals

May 8, 2013

One of the most challenging aspects of responsive design is creating a complex menu system that works well on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. In this post, I will briefly discuss the common problems and then move on to outline a proposal for one possible way of handling them elegantly across a multitude of devices. (more…)