I recently had a chance to work on a number of WordPress related projects and I was pleasantly surprised as the platform had matured in every possible way since the early 2.x releases.
Today I just wanted to post a brief note to people who are still using random WordPress templates to base their derived templates on: please don’t do that to yourself. Most of the free themes are old, don’t have good customization options and are badly structured.
You’ll be much better off if you:
- Read about Child themes – http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
- Invest into a customizable theme – my preferred choice is Theme Hybrid but there are a number of other options. It costs 25USD/year to get access to support forums and tutorials that have saved me many hours of Googling.
- Read their docs about how to override theme with custom style.css and functions.php
This means that you’ll often be able to make really great custom child theme with just a few lines of css and a few filters.
Wouldn’t call it a ‘chance to work with WordPress’, for exactly that reason you are describing: the terrible state many of the themes are in (code wise). But this sounds good. Will bookmark it. Thanks!