Using a Parent them and modify it by edits in a child theme to save time and rely on work by the parent so you don’t have to start from scratch.

http://slides.com/codeprokid/themes

The Problem

• Clients want the world but no money to pay for it.
• You want to share your designs but only have 30 hours to work on it

Advantages of Parent Theme and Child Themes

• Easy to work with
• Simple ot modify
• Actually looks like something out of the box

Disadvantages

Kitchen sink method leads to bloated code and possibly legacy code

Use cases

• Get stuff built fast where people don’t care about scalability
• New users to wordpress who want to build
• I’m building a simple theme that’s largely based on the parent

Examples

• FoundationPress
• WP-Forge

Starter Themes

A starter them is a base theme

Advantages

• Provides a great development starter so save time, usually light weight and save time.
• Provide only what you really want

Disadvantages

• You have to update it yourself
• More dev time
• Underscores, Sage, Bones

Theme Frameworks

• Focused on extending core functionality
• Geo location
• can be implemented as a plugin or theme, drop in code

Advantages

• Separate visual from functionality
• usually built on hooks to easily modify
• makes content portable as a plugin - so you can switch themes

Disadvantages

• High bar of entry and requires time and specific features for just that system

Use Cases

• Common framewoks for Multisite
• Hooks and Filters are awesome

Examples

• Genesis
• Themosis
• Carrington Core
• Thesis

The DIY Route

Where do I start?

• Looks at sites you have built before and identify the common features
• Dig through code from other themes
• Fork another boilerplate

Stuff in My starter theme

• Logo
• Advanced Custom Fields
• Banner behind logo
• Sidebar
• Social Links
• Social Feeds
• Sliders
• Custom widget classes
• Plugin dependencies
• Debug fuctions
• Helpers
• Query shorthands
• breadcrumbs
• custom login logo
• custom excerpt function

Advantages

• 100% control
• You make some assumtions others wouldn’t
• tailored to your own needs to be light as possible for your own use

Disadvantages

• It’s a lot of work
• Requires a deep knowledge of care and an in depth knowledge of your company’s or customers needs

Use cases

• Trust issues
• Specific needs
• Need a site quickly that meets these requrements
• great for downtime work
• save times when busy

Make notes of things that take long and include it in a plugin or theme

Whitechanges for ACF to upload and create from past JSON files

Ryan Kanner
@CodeProKid