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I was having a water cooler conversation that turned into a debate with someone at work yesterday. We were talking about approaches to styling WordPress blogs using themes.

I’ll take this opportunity to digress before diving into the detail and tell you about a particular ethos at Gruden. This is obviously the preach part of the post.

So at Gruden we believe strongly in web standards and accessibility, but at the same time, we believe just as strongly in usability, user engagement and simplicity in design. In fact we believe you can and should have all of these in everything you do on the web, it’s the kind of thing we take a lot of pride in doing for our clients. But as anyone who’s tried to do any reasonably non-trivial interactive, accessible and standards compliant stuff on the web can tell you, it’s not always the easiest thing in the world to do. And it’s not something you’d normally want to invest time in when you get home from work, especially for something as pre-canned as a blog.

Well actually, for people like us at Gruden, it is.

So back to the debate… So Peter was telling me that it would be trivial to knock up a customisation on a WordPress theme in 4 or so lines of php code and thought that that was the best way to style a blog. I was busy extolling the virtues of K2 and insisting that it was the best approach. Having spent many a year as Development Manager in the online space, one thing I’ve learned is that the less actual programming languages you need to work in, the better… And we all need to know css right?

My argument behind K2 was this; I refuse to invest any time in any component that is more likely to have someone as passionate about this stuff as me with more available time to tweak it than I ever will. Hence my preference to buy before I build. I want a theme that has the best of the standards and usability world (i.e. AJAX enabled etc.) and I want to be able to style it with css alone.

For a long time, K2 has been that for me. I didn’t want to touch a single line of php code to style my blog. I was more than happy to modify a stylesheet (I can still wrangle css like a semi-pro these days), but I wasn’t going to make application changes that touched the main-loop.

Peter’s argument was that he’d much rather be as close to the rails of the core system, for the sake of being up-to-date with updates than use yet another link in the chain of infrastructure from db to content being served to the client.

Interestingly enough, we were both arguing the same point, just from slightly different perspectives. Peter thought that a few php lines of code were easily maintainable, and my point was that merely updating a css file was far more maintainable (think future proofing against WordPress upgrades). Along the way through this debate, I had to concede to Peter that in fact K2 is no longer that well fitting a solution to my needs, since it hasn’t been updated with WordPress for a while, and the markup isn’t the nicest in the world.

So I throw out a random comment, “I’m sure someone is bound to take the Html 5 boiler plate stuff and wrap it round a nice functional WordPress theme, I’d even be willing to do that to twenty ten eventually.”

Enter thematic and wordpress child themes with HTML 5 boiler plate pre-rolled.

This is a wordpress theme engine, that makes it easy to put together a minimalistically plumbed (i.e. just the css thanks folks) theme using WordPress child themes and gives you all the bells and whistles expected in today’s web. And to top it off it seems to be maintained and updated pretty much in synch with WordPress updates. Have I mentioned lately how I love the fact that if I need to do something with WordPress these days someone’s already done it as a plugin?

Anyhow, I look to move my theme style across to thematic with HTML 5 boiler plate at some stage in the near future (the practise part).