Last month, Ian sent me simple question: What is the Future of WordPress themes? I wanted to reply but my answer ended up being too long (500 word limit).

Instead, I’ll answer his question here: What is the Future of WordPress themes?

First off, Noel has an extraordinary post on what he thinks about the future (of WordPress themes):

Empowering users with the ability to play art director and control as much as they can, from within a theme, is the future.

Inline with that thinking, we need to empower users with the ability to not only control *how* the site looks, but *what* it does. We need to think about themes as more than the paint on the walls, but as the structure of the building. WordPress is about more than words. Photoblogs, videoblogs, tumblelogs, stores, applications – we need more diversity in not just the look, but the type of themes in the WordPress world. I’m not sure “theme” or “template” even covers what it is a “theme” does.

The future is looking at the past and understanding what made the web so interesting in the beginning, and then figuring out how we can help WordPress users do just that.

WordPress has grown more than a personal publishing platform, it’s time for WordPress themes to reflect that.

Theme Frameworks

I think in order to achieve this, theme authoring needs to make some advancements.
Enter, WordPress Theme Frameworks. Ian’s article pretty much sums up that 2009 is the year of theme frameworks. While some might disagree, it’s inevitable because it’s already happening. WordPress theme frameworks provide the foundation to build smarter, more powerful themes that are truly forward-thinking.

I can’t vouch for all theme frameworks, but WP Framework will strive and pave the way for these advancements. WordPress themes have long been lacking a solid foundation to design and develop new WordPress themes upon. Theme frameworks are the answer and solve many problems regular themes currently face to-date, like protecting user modifications. Nathan Rice explains this nicely:

For instance, if you wanted to change the way the WordPress core files worked, you would be stupid to actually modify the core files. Thus, WordPress introduced the plugin system coupled with the use of actions and filters so that you can change the way WordPress works without actually modifying the core files.

In that same way, theme frameworks are built using the same action and filter system that WordPress uses.

But why?

Easy … just like with WordPress, if you’ve made your modifications to the way the theme runs via a child theme hooking into the actions and filters, when the theme author decides to come along and update the theme, your changes will remain intact.

I’ll end this with a comment I posted on adii’s article:

Theme Frameworks are the new breed of WordPress themes. They’re basically WordPress themes done right.

Theme Framework woes

Of course while a new concept gets introduced, new problems arise along with it. For one, user modifications get harder:

Frameworks — even the best frameworks, with the best documentation — are hard to modify. Here’s the process for the framework I’m making.

If you want to change the “read more” text using the new iThemes Framework:
1. Open up your child-theme’s /custom/functions.php file
2. Create a function that returns your custom text.
3. Hook that function the the more_link_text filter

Another proof would be this video, which explains how to change the text in the footer of Theis:
http://vimeo.com/3075621

Is that intuitive? No. Is it as easy as opening up a template file and modifying raw text? No. Is this a problem? Yes. — Nathan Rice

While modifying theme frameworks using hooks and actions are the smart way and protect user modifications, it does add a small learning curve for WordPress end-users. My suggestion for this would be something David Peralty coined in “What Makes WPUnlimited Different?“, traditional theme files:

So you might be asking yourself why traditional theme files is important or worth mentioning, but one of the issues I have always had with Thesis, a theme I enjoyed was the fact that opening header.php didn’t really give me a normal WordPress header.php theme file. It was just a call to another PHP file, making the whole customization aspect a nightmare for a beginner programmer.

A good example of the difference is to look at a popular WordPress theme’s index file, which only includes something along the lines of: html_framework();

Just that one line… no mention of includes for headers or footers, no loops, nothing.

This leaves someone looking to customize how posts are displayed with the horrible task of digging through files to see where that PHP code is, and how they can manipulate it.

WordPress Unlimited’s theme files look very much like you’ve seen since the Classic theme was created, with easy to understand header, footer, and index pages that makes editing the theme easy for anyone immersed in WordPress already. — David Peralty

Using traditional theme files aren’t an end to all solutions, but it’ll definitely help WordPress end-users who are already familiar with WordPress code like Kubrick and others.

Widgets

As Jeff said last year and again in this year’s Future of WordPress Themes post: Widgets are the future. Since widgets became available to WordPress users back in 2.1, they really haven’t been taking advantage of by theme authors. You could say part of this was due to how widgets were managed, but this won’t be an excuse after WordPress 2.8. The widget management interface is getting a complete overhaul and hopefully spark new ways to take advantage of this powerful system. A while ago, I spoke with Jeff about widget management. The idea was to create to reshape the current WordPress widget management interface with a visual layout of your site via a wireframe. Jeff explains this better:

When I login to WordPress and browse into the themes/widgets area, at the center of the screen, I want to see a wireframe of the theme I am using on my blog. This wireframe can be incredibly simple highlighting the header, navigation column, widget sidebars, footer, content area, ect. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just enough to provide an at a glance view with regards to where widgets can be displayed.
[...]

I want the ability to drag widgets from a repository into the widgetized areas located within the wireframe of my theme. This would enable me to know without looking how and where the widgets would be displayed on the site. I could then drag widgets up and down to change their display order within the wireframe as well. No need for a drop down box to select which sidebar you want to place widgets in because the wireframe would show the labels for each sidebar.

In order to do this, I had to set some foundations within WP Framework. Once WordPress 2.8 releases, I’ll continue to turn this idea into reality. WP Framework will spark innovation with widgets for sure.

What about the business side of WordPress themes?

Well of course the paid theme market is still very alive and active, as it should be. I hope 2009 will introduce a new wave of creative business models for theme authors looking to make profits from their work. The current model of selling two types of restrictive (single, developer) licenses is old and flawed. There are plenty of ways to create a business model around WordPress themes and make a decent profit, all while honoring the GPL. You just have to get creative (modification added):

So here’s the plain and simple point of it all: your theme files are PHP and they are dependent on the WordPress codebase and have no existence outside of that dependency, so you can’t charge for restrict them. BUT… the creatively-minded entrepreneurs among us will not walk away just because of that. Instead, they will do what smart business-people always do: they will create value somewhere else. In Brian’s case, it is with support. For someone else, it will be theme customization. For someone else, it will be something I haven’t even thought of yet. But it WILL be valuable and it will be worth the money charged, and it WON’T contravene the letter or the spirit of the GPL. — Alister Cameron.

And that’s what I hope to do this year.

I’ve learned a lot from the WordPress community during the past two-ish years of me being apart of it. And a lot of the talented people working with WordPress tend to have similar ideas. Pretty much everyone’s working on a theme framework or some new innovation in WordPress themes. In the end, “Great minds think alike” and that only leads up to who will pioneer these innovations first.