WordPress Wizards Week: Day 5

After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I’ll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what’s next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in what is a slightly more focused discussion than last time!

[the-series]

Today it’s Ian Stewart who has very recently joined Automattic as “Theme Wrangler”.

Recently commercial ‘frameworks’ have been increasing in number. Is the way forward a single all powerful theme that has pretty child themes?

Maybe. Probably not. All powerful Themes with pretty Child Themes are
a solution to a lot of Theme development problems (specifically, rapid
site development in a particular mode) but they can’t solve every
problem.

Often there will be a single feature that over a couple of months everyone adopts; what do you think it’ll be this year?

My wild guess is that this year we’ll see simplicity become a feature
in WordPress themes with the disappearance of ridiculously massive
options pages altogether. We’ll see the best WordPress Themes become
simpler and more focused.

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