A theme defines the overall look and feel for your site. Remember, your WordPress site is a dynamic one, which means that the content you write is picked up from a database and fashioned by your theme.
Don’t like your current theme? Simply try installing a different one, without having to touch your blog posts and articles. Just don’t change your theme too frequently; you might leave your visitors disoriented.
What are the approaches to building themes?
While there’s an amazing wealth of free themes to explore at the official WordPress repository, you might still want something tailor-made especially for you.
This is where it will help to know how themes are built.
One approach is to build them from scratch, putting together all the complex code and gradually achieving the look and feel you want.
Another is to use a theme framework, which is essentially a strong foundation for theme developers to capitalize on.
The table below will help you understand the difference in the development effort for the two approaches.
| Themes developed from scratch | Theme frameworks | |
| Development time | High; no foundation to build upon | Low; the process is quicker |
| SEO friendliness | Low to high; challenging to improve | High, for well-coded frameworks |
| Security | Low to high, depending on theme quality | High, since frameworks tend to be robust |
| Ease of customization | Low to high, depending on theme quality | High, for well-coded frameworks |
rtPanel
Our specialist developers at rtCamp kept in mind the benefits of theme frameworks while coming up with the free and open source rtPanel theme framework.
Technical support post-installation is free as well – we love giving back something to the hugely supportive open source community.
rtPanel has two major goals:
- Helping developers with standard codes for robust theme development
- Presenting user-friendly customization options for end-users, even if they’re not technically inclined.
We feel encouraged by over 28,000 downloads so far, and 4.4 out of 5 stars in ratings from reviewers!
You can try out rtPanel for your WordPress site and let us know your feedback.
Links: Download rtPanel theme framework from WordPress.org | Fork rtPanel from GitHub
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