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Beginners Guide

The WPKube Guide to Standalone Themes vs Theme Frameworks

Last Updated on: May 4, 2016 Sourav Kundu 11 Comments

The WPKube Guide to Standalone Themes vs Theme Frameworks

With over thousands of immensely popular premium WordPress themes available and the continuous state of WordPress’ development, sometimes it might be difficult to decide between WordPress themes. After all, the reader’s visual experience plays a crucial role in building your site’s reputation.

Today we’re going to look into some of the factors which will help you decide in buying a theme framework or a standalone theme. First, let us by defining the two things that we’re going to compare today – a WordPress standalone theme and a framework.

I’ve purposely used the word standalone to emphasize on the fact that the theme is, in itself, a singularity. It does not inherit its features from any other parent theme (except, of course the core WordPress functions). According to the WordPress Codex, a WordPress theme framework on the other hand, has two meanings:

  • A “drop-in” code library that is used to facilitate development of a theme.
  • A stand-alone base/starter theme that is intended either to be inherited (used by) into another (child) theme, or else to be used as a parent theme template.

A theme framework is like a developer’s toolkit – a set of tools the developer/designer uses to build a theme of his own. In comparison, a standalone theme is a ready made solution, with a buck load of features, but whose flexibility is severely limited. Examples of standalone themes are the ones your find in WordPress.org and theme shops like Themeforest.

They can be easily updated by the respective developer, but not the independent developers or designers. Just figuring out what and where functions are used, is a tedious job.

This is where a theme framework comes in. Since it is a kit, you know what tools are available at your disposal, when and where to use them. There’s a handy user’s guide and an added support community to help you craft beautiful, personalized themes. But this is all metaphorical talk.

Technically speaking, a framework consists of a bunch of pre-defined classes and functions, ready to be used by the developer. A new theme is always created in the form of a child theme which inherits the classes from the framework.

When the framework is updated, the classes have new and/or improved code, while not modifying the return values (outputs) of the previous version of the framework’s functions.

This ensures backward compatibility. Thus whenever a framework is updated, it does not mean that the developer has to make necessary changes in his custom child theme. It only means that he’s got more tools at his disposal.

Now that we have a better understanding of the two, let us dig into the real topic of discussion.

When do I use a Standalone Theme?

The primal factor is budget. If you’re on a tight budget, a standalone theme is always more efficient. It costs less, easy to maintain and comes loaded with useful shortcodes and other useful features – such as a theme options panel where you can customize the logo, the general colors, fonts, etc.

For the average user, such themes more than serves their purpose – which is, ultimately giving your website a professional look. With the hundreds of excellent themes available in Themeforest and other reputed theme shops, your only task is to chose one wisely.

The next factor is future-proofing your brand/website. If you’re a blogger who wants to focus on just the content, then by all means, go for a standalone theme. You would not have to worry about adding new features or solving compatibility issues with WordPress updates, because that’ll all be taken care of by the theme’s developer.

However, you would feel the pinch when you’ll want to shift/change themes in the future. Because you’ll be using the custom shortcodes and post-types specific to your current theme, porting to another theme would incur a lot of overhead. And if you were to hire someone for the job, rest assured, it’ll cost you a good amount. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of using a standalone theme.

When do I use a Theme Framework?

Genesis-Framework

A short answer would be when you’re facing the exact opposite of the situations mentioned above. Industry leading frameworks like Genesis and Thesis are superior in coding – they follow the WordPress theme development guidelines, stocked with a plethora of functions, better security and improved SEO. Although most of the popular standalone themes have in-built SEO options, some of them are poorly coded, some don’t follow the WordPress theme development guidelines, etc. These may be considered as some of the subtle disadvantages of standalone themes.

If you’re a developer, designer or a WordPress enthusiast, then a theme framework is definitely for you. You’ll learn a ton of stuff along the way, and will be able to develop themes for a lot of clients – swift and easy. If you’re managing a company’s website and have solid funding in your department – go for a theme framework and hire a developer to create a custom theme for you. Surely the initial costs will be sky-high (compared to just buying a standalone theme) but you’ll be future-proofing your brand.

Conclusion

To sum up, here’s a quick overview. Go for a theme framework when:

  • You have the right budget
  • You’re eager to learn theme development
  • You’re a WordPress theme developer/designer (of course you already know this 😛 )

A standalone theme is your best bet with:

  • You’re on a tight budget
  • Coding isn’t your strong suite – you just want to focus on your site’s content

Finally, a discussion is a two way process. So kindly leave your thoughts in the comments section below and let us know your criteria for choosing a theme!

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Sourav Kundu

Sourav is a WordPress enthusiast, an avid gamer and sitcom collector. He's into heavy metal, electronic, and new age music. When he's not online, he's spending quality time with his friends and family.

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11 Comments Leave a Reply
  1. Ryan Biddulph says

    August 31, 2013 at 1:31 pm

    Good breakdown here. I am a bit hazy on themes; just did a rehaul of my theme a few weeks back. Learning more daily.

    Reply
  2. Tom Jamieson says

    August 31, 2013 at 2:15 pm

    Good overview here of the two approaches to WP theming. Thanks for the tips. As a newbie to WP coding, this is helpful information. Have a great weekend!

    Reply
  3. Reginald says

    August 31, 2013 at 3:17 pm

    Hey Sourav,

    Excellent write up mate! This is an absolute great round up for both.

    Personally, I would rather use a framework like Genesis as I am no developer. Doing these codes could easily make my mind go spinning and thus, I am able to find useful support especially in Genesis.

    Nonetheless, thanks for sharing this lovely write.

    Thanks mate.

    Reply
  4. Vinod Dalvi says

    September 1, 2013 at 5:58 am

    Good Article…!!!

    The only thing is that i think it isn’t necessary to learn theme development for using theme framework.

    Reply
  5. Kris says

    September 1, 2013 at 9:37 am

    There was once a discussion about feature rich themes and why they suck in long term usage. Multiple shortcodes, buttons etc. should be rather plugins than built-in features.

    Using framework is making website update ready (I mean layout and functionality doesn’t change, when you update core files of framework). And the easy usage, you learn once and then just update the knowledge, no need to start over with every single theme panel, options, clicks, switches and so on.

    Genesis is the easiest way to get good looking, fast and secure website. Beginner may get lost but there is simple hooks plugin, right? 🙂

    Reply
    • Sourav says

      September 1, 2013 at 5:30 pm

      You said it Kris.
      Genesis is the way to go.

      Reply
  6. Gert-Jan says

    September 1, 2013 at 12:40 pm

    I am lead developer at Nexus Themes. Probably your post is correct for most frameworks, but I would like to mentioned we’ve created the Nexus Framework and your post is not correct for our framework.

    Our framework is free, and we allow anyone interested to use / copy / adjust and tune our framework (its GPL licensed, meaning all source code is available for anyone to use, as long as the code you create is GPL too). All the code of our framework is stored in GitHub. We also provide a free theme that uses the framework. If you know how you can configure the free theme in such a way that you can create all paid (premium) themes yourself too.

    If you would be interested, I would like to invite you to review our framework and/or themes using it. Would love to hear your thoughts – Gert-Jan

    Reply
    • Vinod Dalvi says

      September 1, 2013 at 4:46 pm

      @Gert-Jan There are free frameworks which are GPL licensed and also provide free themes for the frameworks.

      How your framework( Nexus Framework ) is different from these framework?

      Your comment seems like advertisement… 🙂

      Reply
      • Gert-Jan says

        September 1, 2013 at 5:10 pm

        Hi Vinod,

        The point I was trying to make was that the “The primal factor” is not (at least not always) budget, since there is free frameworks out there (I don’t know if others are free too, but if I understand you correctly there are multiple ones, so in that case the primal factor is not budget, which was my point?).

        > How your framework( Nexus Framework ) is different from these framework?

        It would be better to ask reviewers / Sourav to compare the frameworks (which is what I was inviting/offering in my reply) since apparently not every framework offers the same features (just like not 2 themes are the same).

        Reply
        • Vinod Dalvi says

          September 1, 2013 at 5:15 pm

          Hi Gert Jan,

          I am agree with your point that “The primal factor” is not (at least not always) budget, since there is free frameworks out there.

          Thanks for directing me to your point.

          I would like to see review of Nexus Framework.

          Reply
    • Sourav says

      September 1, 2013 at 5:39 pm

      Hi Gert-Jan,
      I said that the popular, industry leading frameworks are not free. There are a lot of great frameworks that are free (like yours) – some are available in WordPress.org repository, as Vinod pointed out.

      As for the budget, if I (as a customer), want the best possible features + design in a theme, then, a standalone theme costing 40-50 USD is a better choice than downloading a free framework and hiring a developer to design/modify a child theme based on that free framework – to achieve that exact design and features.

      Nonetheless, it is good to see that you’re offering your framework for free, which helps novice developers.

      Thanks for the offer, we appreciate it, and we will contact once we decide to review your theme.

      Thanks,
      Sourav

      Reply

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