The Carrington framework by Alex King and Crowd Favorite has published an extensive question and answer post on their development blog. The post covers everything from what the Carrington theme framework is all about, what makes it different from other frameworks, and the philosophy behind the framework.
While a number of developers and theme authors have dug into the documentation and example themes and learned how to use Carrington, we’d like to make it a little more accessible to others. We’d also like to clear up some misconceptions about the Carrington framework vs. other WordPress theme frameworks.
One of the most interesting questions in the post asks if Carrington is not a parent theme.
No, it’s not a parent theme and it isn’t intended to be. I think it’s really unfortunate that people decided to call parent themes theme frameworks. They aren’t frameworks in the standard development sense, they are parent themes that support child themes to override certain components of them.
You know, I don’t understand how that term Parent theme for frameworks came about anyways. If any theme can be a framework, it makes the whole thing a moot point. I understand Parent/Child theme relationships, but Parent themes as frameworks? Sure, Thematic, Hybrid and some other frameworks do use their framework theme as a Parent theme which then has a Child theme built from the parent. Boy, the more I talk about it, the more I think we need a WordPress Theme family tree!
From my short venture into it I’d say its overly complicated and a little messy.
@Andreas Nurbo – Lots of people seem to be taking that approach and having the same opinion about it. I’m going to have to download it and take a look for myself to see what all the fuss is about.
@Jeffro I hope you have taken the time to investigate Carrington, it really is quite amazing as well as simple once you understand the concept. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the number of files in comparison to a standard set of wordpress templates.
WordPress templates require a massive amount of code duplication and Carrington does away with that by splitting out each item into an individual files so that a modification can take place only once but appear everywhere.
Even the default 2010 theme is starting to take this approach by splitting out ‘the loop’ into a separate file. Carrington just takes this process as far as is possible.
As you can tell I like it and I’m currently redesigning my site with Carrington JAM (Just Add Markup) so I can really get some in depth experience with the framework.