Free Framework For WordPress – Cherry Framework

The Cherry Framework and its child themes for WordPress can be downloaded from Template Monster, a company founded in 2002.

Template Monster is in the business of e-commerce providing customers with diverse products and services related to the online world. Their main concentration is web design with a narrow focus on affordable web design products and services such as website templates. Their claim is that their library is the largest on the Internet, with over 20,000 website template designs. They add more than 450 designs every month.

The Cherry Framework was released on 12/12/12. They have recently launched a new version called Framework 3.1.This version comes with new updates and bug fixes.

It is free to be downloaded and used and once installed you can then select a theme from the large library of more than 315 themes from Template Monster which are designed to be used with the Cherry Framework.

The image below shows some of their themes.

Please keep in mind that Cherry is a framework, in other words it is a parent theme. When you will install a theme to work with it they will act as child themes for the framework. This feature is especially useful when updating the framework. It can be updated without altering the code of individual themes.

Once you have uploaded the Cherry Framework you can play around with it a little bit to see which theme will suit it the best for your needs and requirements.

If you have installed the framework correctly you will see seven options as shown above.

This feature gives you multiple options and lets you design your site as and how you want. This will let you alter and edit things like the background color, colors of links, fonts of paragraphs, headings and sub-headings, fade effects, slider settings, navigation elements and you can also feed in any CSS code you want to insert.

As the image above shows the Cherry Framework installs and blends seamlessly into the WordPress dashboard and sits there just like all other built-in WordPress options. This is especially helpful for novices, who don’t have a good understanding of frameworks and child themes.

A user who logs in the personal dashboard will find that it looks like a typical WordPress admin panel, but with an additional option of “Cherry Options”. It has a stylized interface and displays a much better overview on WordPress themes, updates for Framework, options for import/export and template customization, documentation and support.

Shortcodes

The posts and pages for your site can be created via shortcodes. 90 percent of website content is generated via shortcodes. For example you can use the Video Preview shortcode to enable video playing from Youtube and Vimeo or the Sitemap shortcode.

Some shortcodes that are in-built into the framework are:

• Links to other posts in list format, grid format and a recent posts list
• Sliders and carousels
• Service boxes to display information blocks
• Columns in a range of configurations including fluid columns

 

You should at least try the Cherry Framework. Go and take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below.