Archetype WordPress Theme: Beta Release

2009 July 4
by Raymond Selda

I’m releasing Archetype WordPress Theme beta version. Feel free to use Archetype in your blog and please report anything that needs to be improved. There are still a lot of stuff that needs to be cleaned out including stylesheets, widgets, hooks and among many others.

What is Archetype?

Archetype is another one of those theme frameworks in WordPress. A theme framework can also be classified as a parent theme. A theme framework enables you to speed up theme development by providing you a solid code base to start. It also lets you work on your own customizations without touching the parent theme’s files.

Why Create Another Theme Framework?

I created Archetype to help speed up my theme development and to also learn more about theme development in general. I also want to offer something useful to the community.

Inspiration

Archetype is heavily inspired by Ian Stewart’s Thematic. I also checked out ThemeHybrid’s code but I always find myself coming back to Thematic.

Multiple Layouts

Archetype has 10 layouts that you can choose from including fixed and liquid content using two or three columns. The good news is most of the layouts work in Internet Explorer 6 and above.

Download and Screenshot

Feedback

Please go ahead and try it out. I would love to build a community behind Archetype so I would greatly appreciate it if you can give your thoughts and feedback. Thank you.

5 Responses leave one →
  1. July 6, 2009

    Congrats on developing a framework. I’m working on one myself and I know how much goes into developing one. I’ve also been using both Thematic and Hybrid as models, along with a couple others, but I too keep coming back to thematic to build on. Ian did a great job with it.

    I’ve downloaded Archetype and when I get a chance I’ll take a deeper look and share my thoughts.

    I’m sure you learned a lot about WordPress by working on Archetype. I know I’ve learned a lot while working on my framework and even if no one else ever wants to use it, it’ll still have been valuable to develop.

    I’m guessing you may have some child themes for Archetype at some point in the future and I’ll be looking forward to seeing them.

  2. July 6, 2009

    Hi Steven,

    Ian really did an awesome job with Thematic. At first I was overwhelmed with their code but I then realized that you just have to take things at the very basic so the learning curve would be gradual.

    I will release child themes to support Archetype. I’ve been getting a number of queries on a specific type of theme.

    Thank you for downloading Archetype and I hope to hear your feedback. I’m happy to know that someone really downloaded the framework.

  3. July 7, 2009

    hey raymond!!

    this comment isn’t related to the theme, though it is looking super power.

    i found your site from a comment you left on my good friend glen’s site pluginid.

    really love your design sensibility. both your landing page with the sliding screenshots and your blog theme.

    been heavy in design for ages but taught myself css and html from scratch to design my site.

    how did you do the sliding previews? good friend of mine is doing something similar in python (or might be ajax) and keen to see a tutorial on it. i know a lot of javascript but minimal css / html / python. fast learner tho :)

    awwwsome site all round

    stumbled and tweeted.

    keep well and in touch
    alex – unleash reality

  4. July 7, 2009

    Hi Alex!

    Thanks for the kind words. I’m still learning a lot on web design and Save The Pixel book is really a lot of help.

    As for the sliding previews, I used jQuery loopedSlider. I just removed the navigation and set the slider to auto start. I wrote a quick tutorial on using the plugin here http://bit.ly/PQhpZ

    I don’t know a lot about Javascript that’s why I’m thankful for jQuery and its plugins. hehehe.

    Thanks for stumbling and tweeting. Really appreciate it.

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