Chapter 7: Theme Building: Frameworks, Standalone Themes, or Child Themes?
Theme Building is at the heart of WordPress development—if you can't build or customize themes, it's impossible to develop a personalized WordPress site. As a WordPress professional, however, it's important that you develop a theme-building process that is efficient and works for your team.
In this chapter you'll learn about the different approaches to theme development and how to identify the right one for your team and your project. Some developers and agencies choose to use the same approach for every project they work on, while others adopt different methods depending on the project's needs. Although choosing a development style is ultimately your decision, understanding how the approaches vary will enable you to the select the most appropriate one, rather than just choose the path of least resistance.
Theme-Building Principles
If you're developing a theme for a client site, you need to work with your team (if you have one) and with the client to identify what that theme needs to incorporate and how to best achieve that, as well as ensure that it is future-proofed. If you're developing a theme for release to other developers and users, your theme should meet an identified need if it's to be useful to people. You'll learn more about this in detail in Chapter 12.
When identifying which approach to take to theme building, consider the following criteria:
• Time—Which theme-building approach will be most ...
