Carrington CMS Theme Framework.

Even though staying at Ian’s place has been a bit of an inconvenience for both parties involved, Ian and I have always shared similar interests, and web design is definitely one of them. He recently introduced me to the Carrington CMS theme framework, which is a theme for WordPress that is more than meets the eye (shameless plug for the upcoming 2nd Transformers movie). It’s boasts a more complicated but logically structured framework that allows for easier modification without much hacking. I’ve been playing around with a couple of Chris Pearson’s themes, namely Neoclassical and Copyblogger (nay, a more accurate substitution for playing would be fighting), and they have not been easy to modify, because Pearson’s markup is horrendous and unstructured from a coder’s point of view. However, you can’t fault the guy, since he is primarily a designer and not a coder. Fortunately, I’ve developed habits during my coding years that I can’t shake even now. For example, compare the following snippets of CSS markup:

div#content { margin: 0; padding: 10px; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; background: #FFFFFF; }

div#content {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 10px;
	font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	background: #FFFFFF;
}

Which one looks more structured and easier to navigate to you? Obviously the second one. But, I digress; this post was not to critique Pearson’s markup habits but to spread the word about Carrington. You can get Carrington already pre-built into two templates called Blog and Text. If you design for a mobile platform, there’s even a Mobile theme available. However, if you want complete control over how your site will look while still taking advantage of the framework, you’ll want JAM (Just Add Markup). Check out the Carrington themes here.

I installed the JAM theme on my Beta site and as of this writing, it currently looks like the screenshot below.