Of late commercial frameworks have started appearing everywhere. This post will try and make sense of it all, comparing Frugal, Headway, Builder, Genesis and Elemental. That’s all the commercial frameworks I could think of bar Thesis, who didn’t reply to me emails. This is an unbiased, unaffiliated look at what your options are if you want something to build more WordPress sites off.

Update 06-04-2010 — I’ve added in affiliate links as regular readers will have read the article by now, but the content remains the same.

Frugal

Initial impressions are good. A hefty user guide covers most things although a quick video introduction to the theme would have been useful. Installation goes smoothly and I’m all set with a decent looking site from the off.

Frugal’s big selling point is it’s options pages. These offer you a huge array of different options for changing the look and feel of your site. In a couple of minutes I was able to make a respectable looking site which was impressive.

Asides from the theme options, Frugal offers the usual in post SEO options and a whole load of custom hooks.

Who’s this for? I’d say it’s a better option that Thesis for most, and Eric Hamm, Frugal founder agrees with me (he also thinks that everyone, everywhere should be using it though!):

I see all kinds of people use my theme.  From total beginners to seasoned WP developers. Usually, though, it seems to be people who don’t want to mess with much coding, but who still want to do-it-all with their theme.

Summing up, really comprehensive options pages let you change pretty heftily the design. I fear though that if you don’t know a lot about design then you’d find the options overwhelming and not know what to change.

Headway

Wow. Headway’s got a visual editor that’s not like anything I’ve ever seen in a WordPress theme.

Headway is visual.  You edit and customize the theme right before your eyes.  We use a system that consists of “leafs”.  Leafs can be compared to widgets, but you can move a leaf almost anywhere on the page.  You can also have sidebar leafs that allow you to add widgets.  The sky is the limit.

That’s Headway’s Clay Griffiths. He’s not far wrong actually. Headway has a visual editor overlay thing that lets you quite literally drag bits around your page. If you want a block wider you can either set the width or just drag it across the page! It’s very well done – you can hover over an element to find its class or ID, click on elements to change them etc etc. A video would explain this better, so I’ve just made one. I didn’t narrate it as I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing – I was just playing around 🙂

Headway also has things like the colour pickers, options pages, all the things you’d expect from a premium theme. I’m impressed, but would I actually use it? I’m not sure I would. I don’t think you’d ever be able to create something really nice and unique by dragging and dropping. Some might find it’s a good option, but for most I think it’s a bit too gimmicky.

Builder

Builder has a page that lets you… well, build pages in a way similar to Headway’s visual editor.

It’s not quite as innovative as Headway – no drag and drop here, but the interface is functional – select a ‘module’ – be it navigation, widget bar, content area, footer etc and where you want it and you’ve built a layout. You can then choose to apply this to a page, post or homepage. You’ve got control over the layout but not really the design which I’m not sure isn’t a bad thing – with Frugal and Headway I get the idea you’ll see largely the same sites being churned – there’s only so far you can get with their options I think.

Other nice touches include things like a menu manager (although it’s nothing like the 3.0 manager!) and a couple of SEO options. It also has iThemes’ impressive array of video tutorials which cover most things I can think of from changing your permalink structure to creating a post. As with the others, it offers what you’d expect from a decent quality premium theme.

It’s right up with Headway with the whole build pages idea and between the two I’d probably go with Builder – it doesn’t offer nearly the same design options, but for building layouts, it’s pretty good and my favourite out of Frugal and Headway.

And now for something completely different

You’ll only be able to get so far with any of Headway, Frugal or Builder before you have to actually start writing some code. No matter what you do with any of these themes, with the built in options, they’ll still have some features that point them out as powered by that theme. They’re all good for people who can’t write code, but you’ll only get so far editing them and no way are these going to be the death of the good old well designed and then coded theme.

The second half of this post will look at two ‘frameworks’ that more or less exclusively designed for building new designs. Introducing Genesis and Elemental.

Genesis and Elemental

From StudioPress, Brian and Nathan did a pretty damn good job of presenting Genesis as the be all and end all of frameworks. On installation I was impressed with the options page that isn’t covered in jQuery, but actually looks nice and blends in with the WordPress backend. The big focus though is on child themes. Genesis has been presented as something that you can build all kinds of sites off and it’ll function great regardless. Hooks and filters all over the place, they’ve certainly nailed those. The SEO options are comprehensive too, I’ll give them that as well. I’m going to come back to Genesis in a sec. First, Elemental.

Elemental is from ProThemeDesign. It’s certainly a turn away from the likes of Mimbo and if I’m honest I had pretty high expectations of it. Ben’s work is always awesome so something that was originally built for him has got to be pretty good, I thought. On installation I instantly took a shone to Elemental. I don’t know why, but I got the impression that if I was going to build all my themes off something, then this would be it.

In a framework like this, it’s the attention to detail that matters and Genesis might win on the development side, but the little touches like a bar at the top of all pages with quick links to writing posts, pages and the dashboard make me lean towards Elemental as something I’d actually like to use day in, day out.

Between the two, Genesis is certainly well made, but then so is Elemental. The Genesis options page fits in really nicely but the Elemental one looks good too. It’s tough to choose between the two; they both offer similar awesome page templates, options pages, filters and hooks. There is one difference though that separates the two. Genesis offers a theme store which lets you buy child themes but Elemental doesn’t. For me, it’s not a problem, but if you don’t want to build a design from scratch then Genesis should be the one to go for. If you want something to build all your sites with then go for Elemental as it’s a pleasure to use.

Could you concise that?

Sure. Frugal has a huge options panel which is good for those of you who want something they can customise a bit but ultimately you want a blog look. Headway is like Frugal with layout options added on. Builder is what Frugal would be if it did layout options instead of design options.

Genesis and Elemental are both very well built but the deciding factor is whether you want to be able to buy child themes (note themes – you can buy them for Elemental from ProThemeDesign). If you do, go for Genesis, but if not Elemental.