I've been evaluating a number of theme frameworks under the hood for a month or so now.

I'm looking at Genesis, which has very tight code with few calls to the server, but which is not WYSIWYG;

Headway, which doesn't have quite as tight of code but is more WYSIWYG;

iThemes Builder, which has pretty good code and is fairly WYSIWYG;

Hybrid, which again has very good code but requires a good knowledge of CSS;

Gravy, which is more of a design tool,

And Themeframe.

One of the best articles I've seen that compares 3 of these is this article, the Premium Theme Framework Smackdown. It made me look at things like calls to the server, compliance and mySQL issues.

How does Themeframe compare in these ways? If it's competitive here, that would be awesome. I've been happily using Atahualpa for a year on a couple of different sites.

Thanks, interesting article...

Link is broken however - (missing colon!)

Should be:

http://technosailor.aaronbrazell.com...ork-smackdown/

I look forward to Flynn response to your questions...

regards, Dave

Don't any current users want to weigh in on this?

All I can say is I have tried many "frameworks" (Thesis, Genesis, Builder, Artisteer, and Hybrid to name a few) and keep coming back to Atahualpa/Themeframe.

Is it fast? Is the code compliant? Are there any sites built with it that I could see? I'm sitting here parked on Paypal, but my financial situation is pretty precarious at the moment, so I really need to be sure about this.

Thanks!

Themeframe is still in beta bookmom. The reason to get in now is for a reduced price. What do you want to use it for? Are you a developer or do you want it for you own site?

Flynn has always impressed me with his knowledge of SEO, compliance, etc. and is a lot more level headed about this whole issue than many. In all of my wanderings around the net these things are discussed and discussed with many differing opinions.

I can't tell you to buy or not. If money is real tight maybe this isn't the right time. I am still using Atahualpa for all my development but suspect at some point Themeframe may be a better choice. Be aware that Themeframe still requires some knowledge of CSS but gives you a lot of WYSIWYG adjustments. The video gives you a pretty good idea of what it is like.

Let us know if you have more questions.

There is a fundamental difference between those you mentioned and TF:

ThemeFrame is a Theme creation tool that creates standalone themes whereas those you mentioned are either "highly configurable themes" or "theme frameworks". They all integrate into WP which also means they are required to run the created/configured theme, whereas ThemeFrame is not required to run a TF created theme.

This also results in licensing issues. With themes created with TF you can do "whatever you want", including selling, giving away for free, whatever, because the TF application itself is not inlcuded in the theme itself, and not required. This is quite different from the other solutions.

Themeframe is more like Artisteer than those you mentioned, if you will.

Compared to Artisteer I'd say that ThemeFrame offers way more configurability and targets rather ambitioned site owners, developers, designers, whereas Artisteer is probably easier and quicker to build a theme with. Also, Artisteer is available for various CMS whereas TF focusses on WP.

Something that is very unique about Atahualpa and Themeframe is the layout technique being used. To be able to create FLEXIBLE layout width that work well in IE 6 too, a combination of a table, a DIV and a rarely used element "colgroup" is being used. You will find many developers/designers consider "using a table" is amateurish because tables aren't "supposed to" be used for layout, but those developers usually simply avoid Flexible layouts like a plague, or they declare IE6 as being outdated. You can google for IE 6 market share and see that it sits at a hefty 25% or so and it's decreasing very slowly unlike say Firefox 2, because IE6 was the default browser of Win XP, a very decent OS, and businesses see no need to replace XP, or upgrade the installed IE6. That's why IE6 will be around for the next years.

So if you want to remove a few of your short list, check how other solutions deal with IE6, that will be the easiest way to make your list shorter. Also, if you want to be able to do flexible layouts, too, there aren't many solutions that do this well.

Regardless of all this a DIV-only layout is coming, which will be suited for fixed width layouts (the current BFA layout technique can do both fixed and flexible reliably).

As for SEO, there is only so much you can do with onsite SEO (which is all a theme tool can do, opposed to the more important offsite SEO like getting inbound links). It's mainly about your internal linkage and using useful link anchor text like "Keyword Keyword2" instead of "Home", "Next" and "Back", and proper meta tags, to some extent. I DO consider SEO important and will improve TF in that regard where possible, however the last 2 years or so, started by a very successfull Theme developer, SEO has been a bit overemphasized in the WP theme world I think, with developers claiming marvelous SEO capabilities without mentioning any details, and users saying theme soandso has improved their SEO, without mentioning details either.

Thanks for the very good answer, although I'm still curious to see what kind of code it generates. I'm going to give it a shot.

Bookmom, what is your opinion now? How did you find ThemeFrame? It sounds really good but to the uninitiated we are wondering what are the traps?

There is a sample theme here

http://test.themeframe.com/

It is the default theme included in Themeframe


A table-free version is following within about 2 weeks