Ignite Theme Framework

For the last few months I have been studying all the various theme frameworks that are available for WordPress users at the moment, like Thematic and Hybrid. No doubt, all of those frameworks are excellent. Personally, I think the use of child themes is the way to go in the future. My own reasons for creating Ignite, a new theme framework, which will be released into the wild in maybe 1-3 months, was to learn more about the internal psychological workings of the fantastic publishing platform that is WordPress.

First I was just gonna redesign my personal travel blog Travel-Junkie.com. The more I looked into how WP themes worked the more I realized that themes are just like plugins. Just bigger and in some ways even better. When you start utilizing your functions.php file your theme isn’t only a theme, it becomes a plugin as well.

So, at the moment Ignite is at version 0.1, just at the start of its life. By the time it will be released it will have grown to maybe version 0.3 and be fit to power your WP blog without any major glitches. By the time we have reached version 0.5, hopefully all of those left-over glitches will have been removed and we will release our Ignite Theme Club, which will be built on BuddyPress, bbpress and obviously WP. Basic membership will be free. Premium membership will cost you a little bit (actual price hasn’t been set yet). There will be a community, forums, child themes, Ignite components to download and a fuzzy warm feeling in your stomach.

Now, lets have a look at some of the features:

Plugin Architecture

Ignite comes with an in-built basic plugins system, that works similar to WordPress plugins. Some of those plugins will be included with the theme, others you can download as you need them. Ignite plugins aren’t the same as WP plugins, they are just little add-ons, some of them even for WP plugins, like image or video search. Ignite will be extremely modular. So far there are 25 plugins that extend Ignite functionality.

Plugin Support

Ignite supports a wide range of popular plugins, like WordTube, NextGEN Gallery or All In One SEO.

Only one CSS/JS file!

Ignite lets you add all your CSS/JS files (theme and plugins) into one gzipped, minified file. This means less HTTP requests, which means that your site will respond faster. Should you chose to implement all .htaccess recommendations Ignite will score an 88 (out of 100) with a primed cache at Yahoo’s performance test for fast websites (tested with Firefox’ YSlow extension). The only way to score more is to use a CDN, like Googles AJAX Libraries and reduce HTTP requests by using less background images or combining them in css sprites.

Widgets

Custom built widgets that replace the default WordPress widgets to offer you more options. In addition to that there are 3 more widgets that add other functionality, like post series or postmetadata.

Templates

Many custom templates to make it as easy for you as possible to add extra pages, like an author or category overview.

Special Templates

A templating system that lets you modify almost anything without having to wade through murky code. We have tried to remove as much code as possible from the depths of the Ignite files. These template files can be copied over to your child theme, where you can adjust them without any loss during an Ignite update.

SEO

In-built SEO, from titles, descriptions and keywords to clean URLs, stop words and canonical links.

Hooks & Filters

Almost anything can be hooked into or can have filters applied to it, making Ignite extremely flexible.

Multi Language Support

Ignite is not only fully localized, it has also in-built support for many popular multi language plugins like qTranslate, Polyglot and Language Switcher.

Post Image

Ignite has various methods of ensuring that no blog post comes without an image to display on index and archive pages.

Dropdown Menu

A menu you have full control over. You decide which pages to show in it!

Theme options

Options that help you rather than slow you down and make your site bulky. Less is more, so the most basic version of Ignite ships only with 12 options, all adjustable through the backend. Ignite plugins can add their own admin page and their own options.

By the time the first version of Ignite will be released there will be 5-6 sites (all our personal and commercial sites) to check it out (including this one). All of these themes will have been realized through child themes and will have been redesigned. As we will release these themes we will post about them and how we turned them into Ignite child themes here.

We will also compile a vast documentation about the inner workings of Ignite, the use of child themes and other relevant points of interest, so adjusting Ignite to what you want it to do will become very easy. For everybody not comfortable with PHP, HTML or CSS there will be the premium theme club membership.

We hope that this little taste of Ignite has got you drooling as much as it has us :) We certainly are very excited about the possibilities that Ignite will offer us. Who knows, by the time the first release comes about there will probably be more features for you to get excited about…

Yours truly,
Boris

For the last few months I have been studying all the various theme frameworks that are available for WordPress users at the moment, like Thematic and Hybrid. No doubt, all of those frameworks are excellent. Personally, I think the use of child themes is the way to go in the future. My own reasons ...