While I built the framework and the base design, the hard work was done by Dan and Elise. After only a two hour training session with myself (and a few follow up emails) they managed to master the job.

The site is built on WordPress with some carefully selected plugins to enhance functionality and some tweaking of the theme to render a viable content management system (CMS).

Down the line I will be helping Dan and Elise roll out the ability for supporters of the foundation to make donations and to purchase goods from their shop online.

Pop by and visit. You never know – you may just see a dog or cat in need of rehoming and fall in love.

Using the terms blog and theme has led many to believe it can be downloaded and used to dress up a blog straight from the tin. This is true – it can be if that’s all you want is the vanilla framework.

But the early adopters tend to be those who will find the bugs and try to fix them, or will want to customise by stripping out or adding in a line of code here and there.

Carrington is not like any other existing theme and attempts to tweak it as if it were will usually result in frustration or fail totally without an understanding of how it works. Alex King has been at pains to explain to those who complain it is not user-friendly that “Carrington is a theme framework; it is designed for developers”. [Source: Crowd Favourite Forums]. He must be blue in the face doing so – then he does live in Denver and it’s damn cold there.

That said, many must be happy with it. In little over a month since it was made available on WordPress.org there have been 14,000+ downloads. I am one of those happy people. In fact I’m more than happy. And I’m excited about what the next releases will bring.

Carrington takes the abstraction of WordPress tags to a new level.

Those who are familiar with WordPress conditional tags will be used to doing things such as adding code to the header.php file do make it act differently if what’s is being loaded is, for example, if it’s an archive page do something; do something else if it is a category page; and so on.

Depending on the complexity of what one is trying to be achieve (and the quality, good or bad, of the algorithm employed) this can result in a lot of code.

In Carrington this is done by creating separate archive.php, category.php and so on, files within the header directory. The process is as simple as copying the default-header.php and tweaking as needed.

Carrington automatically detects what is being loaded: If it is an archive it uses the archive.php file. If there isn’t one, it loads the default-header.php.

Novices to Carrington may think this a lot of work, that it leads to multiple files and the same amount of coding, it doesn’t and in cases where it does, it can be a good thing:

I find it leads to much less coding. Copy the default and add, delete or edit a line to do something. No need for conditional statements – Carrington takes care of that.

Usually all that is needed is to make one or two new files. It is unlikely one would want to have different actions for all page and post types.

Multiple files can help the developer modularise their work, much like OO programmers do. In addition, when an update to the framework is released from Crowd Favourite only the defaults will be overwritten at install – all the special coding the developer has done will be unaffected. Unless the default itself has been altered, which in a framework shouldn’t actually happen.

I am certain Carrington can be made do far more than Crowd Favourite say in the documentation or on their website. I’ll let you know how I get on with my experiments. (Hey, com’on – who hasn’t played with the bits in the Do not change the code above this line part?)

I predict Carrington will lead to the rollout of many more frameworks. That they become the standard system for delivering WordPress themes is likely too.