Re: BP showcase – Lead us to water
I appreciate the feedback and perspective. What’s weird is I built a modular php/mysql site circa 2002 basically overusing includes, very basic css and taking functionality from Hotscripts.com’s PHP repository. In fact, what I liked about php was the modularity of what I was doing (even if a bit sloppy). BP/Wordpress seems to promise the same, but frankly the number of sites that deviate from the structure of the standard theme is small (maybe it’s too new). It’s like the complexity of the theme structure has scared people off or the fact that the themes are both style and functionality makes it difficult to be modular.
I’m hard-headed and have no hurried timeline – I’m designing for myself. I’ll probably take this on and suffer the pain of BP’s infancy just like I did in 2002. That was my education. What would be helpful is a methodology for taking on something like this.
My threshhold question is whether to use a theme framework as a starting point or whether that’ll be too restrictive and I just need to bite the bullet and build my own theme. I’d be on the hook for updates (sucks), but it sounds like it may save some pain. My limited understanding of actions/filters is that I should be able to build almost anything from a good theme framework using functions.php and style.css, etc., but not sure if that’s true or whether it’s worth pain of learning that way of developing instead of just tearing apart templates.
I’m sure, by the time I’m done there’ll be dozens of modular BP themes/frameworks to choose from. That’s what happened after I slaved over the site in 2002. Who knew WP was there with plugins for most of the stuff I hardcoded myself.
