Around October of 2010 we decided to look further into WordPress theme frameworks. We hadn’t really explored them and we were curious about how they would impact our workflow. We looked at the most popular ones, and decided to try implementing Carrington. We were getting ready to start a couple new projects and liked the ideas behind using a framework.

1. Quick starting point for theme development.
2. Reusable template partials for loops.
3. Clean and organized structure.
4. Variations and design options.

We started working on a theme for a project using Carrington and the Blueprint CSS grid in October. We completed the design and most of the code in November. The project was then put on hold for a couple months. During the project hiatus we began exploring the template features built into WordPress itself and found some really nice stuff.

We discovered the function get_template_part which was introduced in WordPress 3.0. This allows you to keep your code consolidated and clean by including other files besides just the header, sidebar, and footer into pages like an archive and index page.

The ability to have multiple loop files for custom post types or partials for excerpts or page navigation was a big draw for us in Carrington. Now that we can do the same thing in WordPress, we began to weigh pros and cons of using a theme framework. Ultimately we decided to stick with WordPress’ built-in functions.

Since we code most of our designs by hand, we don’t necessarily need a lot of the functionality that Carrington provides. Therefore, we decided it was easier to use the build in WordPress functions and keep everything in one theme directory rather than a lot of sub-directories which often caused confusion and time as we would have to sift through sub-directories looking for a particular file.

One big con for us in using a framework is having to keep it updated like a plug-in. For Carrington it’s actually pretty easy, you just replace the carrington-core directory in your theme. You then have access to the new features of the core update. You just have to make sure you didn’t change anything in the core directory and that everything works as it did before. For us, that ended up being more of a hassle.

In conclusion, we like the built-in theme functions WordPress 3+ provides. They work well and don’t get in the way of our workflow. After the hiatus ended on the project we started back in October a couple week ago, we decided to go back and tear out the code from Carrington and just build a regular theme. It took us about three days to successfully pull everything out.