Should WordPress have its own CSS Framework?
Monday
May 19, 2008
Despite the high levels of creativity and diversity amongst WordPress themes there are always going to be parts of the theme that are similar. WordPress provides the template tags to get this information out, but it should it also provide a framework for presenting this information?
I’m not suggesting that WordPress should come bundled with blueprint, perish the thought, or that themeing should become a sandbox excercise; however, I do wonder if there are some tasks that can be accomplished centrally to make it easier for anyone producing a theme.
It would be a simple matter to develop a base library that can be included using a theme tag or, even better, to have some background processing that would output a stylesheet to your basic specifications.
Imagine:
<?php wp_stylesheet( 'grid' , "columns=8&width=125&gutter=10" ); ?> <?php wp_stylesheet( 'typography' , "family=helvetica&size=12&baseline=18" ); ?>
Obviously something like the example would make a lot of assumptions and you may need to override them in the theme stylesheet proper, but to have that option might help to set new standards for theme production, as well as making it quicker and easier to do.
So what do you think? Should WordPress have its own CSS theme framework?
Comments
Curtis (http://curtishenson.com)
May 20th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Interesting idea, I love CSS frameworks but I don’t know if one needs to be built into WordPress. I think a plugin would be a better choice, so you could pick which framework you wanted.
I personally probably wouldn’t use it but I’m sure some people would like it.
Ryan (http://pixopoint.com/)
May 20th, 2008 at 5:19 am
No.
I can’t understand why anyone would want this.
Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk)
May 20th, 2008 at 7:00 am
Curtis, a plugin would certainly do the job; however, that would mean theme authors couldn’t rely on it being there. They would probably then need to either reinvent the wheel or include their own version.
Ryan, do you not think there is an attraction for theme authors in being able to use one line to get their typography set up to an acceptable standard or to the community as a whole from knowing that themes all meet that standard? Is there no benefit to be had by highlighting the existence of the methods they include, or of raising the baseline for theme authors?
Di (http://www.diturner.co.uk)
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Whenever I’ve looked into frameworks they’ve always seemed either too restrictive, meaning I’d spend more time undoing stuff the developer put in, or they are bloated with loads of unnecessary code for my design. I don’t think WP theme designers would benefit from a framework and hobbyists would probably end up ignoring what they don’t understand and build the CSS in Word anyway
Andrew Rickmann (http://www.arickmann.co.uk)
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Di, in general I don’t like frameworks for those reasons. But I generally feel that there is scope for using them as defaults or helpers, but I wouldn’t want anything like blueprint.