Basic is a WordPress theme framework, a theme designed to be a flexible foundation for quicker WordPress development.
Basic is born out of my personal needs to have an “almost blank sheet” with the basic common elements in which to place all the other boxes and snippets for the current site.
Basic’s development cycle started with a very useful tutorial published by Ian Stewart, author of the well known framework Thematic. Then there’s some code taken from WordPress’s TwentyTen theme, and finally some personal addons.
Unlike Thematic, I chose to keep Basic very minimal, adding only the most basic features, in order to allow other developers to add their own code easily leaving the main source as clean as possible. A nice companion to Basic is WPSnippets, a website where you can find very useful pieces of code.
Who should use Basic?
Basic was developed with designers and developers in mind, and for all people that can easily manage code. It has a nice default style, but it lacks of options panels, widgets or a particular API. The only special feature which is built-in is mobile device support and detection.
What are Basic’s main features?
A default minimal layout, pretty and usable. Your users can work on content while you build the real theme for the site, probably as a Child Theme. With the default style, Basic can also be used as a documentation system.
A well structured semantic HTML markup. It can be transformed to nearly any kind of layout using CSS, it’s SEO optimized and includes google-supported Microformat markup.
Some pre-made CSS basic layouts, fixed, liquids, elastics single and multi-colums. So you can start developing your unique styles.
Separated trackbacks and threaded comments.
2 widget areas coded to disappear when they’re empty.
Mobile support for device detection and custom mobile stylesheets.
And all the typical WordPress stuff you expect from a theme.
Needless to say that most of these features are inherited from the work of Ian Stewart and the developers behind WordPress’s TwentyTen theme.
Get Basic
For some reason I don’t understand, Basic has not not been accepted by the official theme repository because I use my own code to display the comment_form() instead of the comment_form() function, so you must download it from here.