I’ve just finished reading Wicked Wordpress, and while I thought it was well written, I’m just not feeling the use of frameworks or child themes.
I have successfully built a few business websites using Matthew Higgins’ method outlined in his article Create-your-own-wordpress-theme-from-an-html-template and found this worked really well. My sites are predominantly pages with no blogs.
I like the idea of building my HTML and CSS in Coda or DW then transferring them over to WP template files. Trying to incorporate an existing CSS into a framework seems really hard, does anyone else find this is the case?
So I could keep doing it my way, but my concern is that by building very basic themes from scratch my sites are lacking the fancy hooks and SEO features a framework such as Thematic has. After reading Wicked Wordpress I’m feeling rather inadequate!
I’m wondering what do other people do? If you use a framework, what is your workflow for getting your CSS into the framework?
Sorry if this is a bit muddled…just looking for a bit of advice to get me back on track. Thanks for any feedback 
Thanks Tim, I’ll give the CSS conversion script a go and might even take a look at Thesis instead of Thematic. Cheers.
I actually just used Thematic to build a theme - there was a learning curve at first because I was most familiar with Thesis. But, once you learn the functions and your abilities (and inabilities) from Thematic, it’s much easier to maneuver. I felt Thematic’s issue was poor documentation from what I saw. I actually had more success just doing finds on certain functions (usually found from the template files and what-not) and then reading the function to basically see what it did. A lot of times you can override Thematic’s functions by using a childtheme_override_… call. Unfortunately, the places it should be in places, there really aren’t.
As far as transferring CSS - the best thing you can do with a pre-existing style sheet is write a script to match one element to the next. In effect, it will rewrite all of the coding for you (and can even optimize it better by using CSS shorthand, not duplicating elements, etc.).
Good luck
Thanks Mittineague. I’m wondering how you (or somebody else) go about transforming your design, such as the .psd, into CSS using a framework? Do oyu just go thru each selector and change as required? Or do you write your own CSS first and then convert each selector to the framework’s CSS?
Just not sure the best way to tackle that. And unfortunately Wicked Wordpress doesn’t explain this part too well.
I find frameworks tend to be a lot of work at first. Same as IDEs or any other tool for that matter. Knowing the basics (HTML, CSS, PHP/Java/Ruby etc., Javascript) is essential, then you have to learn the framework!
But once you do manage to learn it (or at least enough of it) then using it can be a big time saver.
For example, to write all the code yourself from scratch to get all the bells and whistles of Thematic would take a lot of effort and time. So if you are working with more than one site and you can work within the limitations of a framework, then it probably would be worth the effort to learn how to work with it.