Skematik

So, Matt Jones — founder of Storefront Themes — presented at the last WPSLC meetup. Mostly he was talking about ecommerce stuff — which is the topic he was scheduled to present on — but he also talked about a few other projects he’s been working on, including Skematik.

At WordCamp SLC in September, he had been working on Skematik and we talked a bit about it then. I was anxious to take a peek but I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about it again until the meetup. So I did. And what you see before you is it.

Okay, you’re right, it doesn’t look like much at the outset. In fact, it probably looks almost identical to what this site looked like before I started using Skematik. (To be fair, I modified some of the templates and am running a child theme of Skematik — one that supports post formats for one thing, and allows my notifications plugin to work.) But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or something. All the goods are under the hood. It’s based off Twitter Bootstrap — something I’ve been developing with lately anyway, and it’s incredibly flexible in terms of how you can customize it out of the box. Obviously, considering it only took a few minutes for me to get it to look almost exactly the same as the site did before I installed it.

What I like about the theme, besides the bootstrappy-ness, is how quickly you can get it up to speed with whatever you’re working on and get a nice looking site that’s immediately responsive (thanks to Bootstrap). Also, he makes full use of the WordPress theme customizer — which I haven’t played with enough, myself, and the only thing that shows up on the Theme Options page as far as settings is a custom CSS editor. It’s pretty cool to be able to tweak your theme before you even deploy it. And then there’s a bunch of shortcodes, but we won’t get into that…

Go check out skematiktheme.com and give Matt some business if you’re interested in an easy-to-use theme/theme framework that already supports some popular plugins (bbpress, buddypress, wp e-commerce, etc) out of the box.