They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, the way of the world is that books are judged by their covers. People are judged by their clothing. And websites are judged by their aesthetics. And for this reason, if you run a website of your own, the layout and design is one of the most important aspects of drawing readers in and keeping them interested.
If you own a website and you use WordPress to power its engine, then you’re lucky. WordPress is absolutely amazing when it comes to customization because it’s been built to support modular themes and plugins. But there are some people who have taken this idea and ran with it, digging deep into WordPress’s code structure to formulate their own frameworks.
A few months ago, I wrote an article detailing 3 Free WordPress Frameworks. If you aren’t sure what a framework is, just think of it as the skeleton on which you can build themes. The framework itself deals with the back-end procedures, allowing you to focus on creating and finding the right themes for your website without having to deal with a mess of code.
Interested? I knew you would be! Here are 3 more WordPress frameworks that will help shape your website into something spectacular – very little effort required!
Roots
The latest craze in the world of web standards is the standardization of HTML 5. It’s a massive improvement over the original HTML and it’s taking over the web, one website at a time. Roots has kept that in mind in its design, having been built from the ground up with HTML 5.
Roots comes packaged with Bootstrap from Twitter, a system with many features, including a fully flexible grid of cells, top bar navigation, responsive interface (meaning the website will seamlessly fit into any browser when it is resized). But that’s just the tip of it all.
What can you expect from Roots?
- Roots produces much cleaner WordPress code, which means increased loading speeds and fewer wasted resources.
- Extremely clean URLs. All links in the source have been rewritten to be root-relative.
- Comes ready with multilanguage support. Right out of the box, there are translations for English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Macedonian, Finnish, Danish, and Turkish.
- Example page templates for different page layout styles.
Wonderflux
Wonderflux claims to be an “advanced open source framework for WordPress.” It is highly professional in style and development and it has many sophisticated features. The downside would be that the learning curve is more difficult than a simple point-and-install framework. If you love to get down and dirty with the internal workings of a machine, you’ll love Wonderflux.
Wonderflux was designed with two particular audiences in mind: designers and developers. This framework can be utilized in different ways depending on who you are and what you’re good with. Developers can alter core functionalities with ease while designers can create entirely different themes without touching any code.
What can you expect from Wonderflux?
- Fully dynamic CSS grid system for theming.
- Over 100 unique display hooks for ease of creating advanced layouts.
- XHTML/CSS display functions that will keep your themes producing 100% valid output.
- Support for Javascript and JQuery plugins.
- Works perfectly with any available WordPress plugin.
Suffusion
Technically, Suffusion calls itself a “theme” as opposed to a “framework,” but with the amount of customization and versatility available, it might as well be called a framework. According to the stats, Suffusion is used on over 16 million WordPress sites all over the world. That’s pretty impressive.
The great thing about Suffusion is that it is extremely easy to use. I managed to install it and have it up and running in less than 5 minutes. It has its own options manager so it’s easy to take control of your site. Additional themes and layouts (called “child themes”) can be downloaded.
What can you expect from Suffusion?
- Built and based on HTML 5.
- Supports a number of customized layout options: mega menus, custom layout templates, custom post types, featured sliders, tabbed sidebar widgets, and built-in widgets for Twitter, Flickr, Google, and more.
- The main site layout has 19 grid areas for ease of design.
- Supports one-, two-, and three-column layouts, as well as magazine layouts. Fixed-width or fluid-width layouts are a breeze.
Conclusion
WordPress frameworks are a great way to spice up your website if simple themes aren’t enough for you. These are all free options that can transform your WordPress site into something spectacular. Give them a shot!
Have you ever used any of these frameworks? If so, tell us about your experiences in the comments. Also, if you know of any other free WordPress frameworks, share those, too!
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