Theme and Plugin Differences

Randy and I had a fun discussion the other day about the programmatic differences between themes and Plugins. For the most part, anything you can program within a theme can be programed into Plugins, and anything you can program into Plugins can be programmed in a theme. So how do you decide which to use for a particular purpose? The answer is simple—PLUGINS!

As we tweaked our site’s theme, Boldy, we had to decide on whether to strip functionality that we didn’t need out of the theme, replace functionality with other Plugins, or move functionality into new Plugins for eventual release to the WordPress Plugin Directory for community benefit. For example, the “Share” button on the bottom of blog posts (below). The design of the button was part of the original theme. We moved that functionality over to a plugin, which could potentially be replaced with something such as ShareThis or AddThis. We decided to make this a plugin, because it represents functionality more so than page design, and could be useful to other sites—not just ours. We did the same thing with the contact form that was part of the original theme.

Other examples of functionality built into the theme we found were (1) Smooth Navigational Menu, (2) prettyPhoto lightbox, (3) Twitter integration, (4) Cufon font smothing, (5) Nivo Slider, and (6) custom search box. All of these features should ideally be built into Plugins, not kept within the theme. We might get to moving those someday!

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Tweaking Boldy

Our recent site relaunch was based upon a free Premium WordPress theme, Boldy by Site5. Leading up to our new site release and since that time we’ve released significant updates to this theme. There have been so many rather bold adjustments that we decided we would let the world know what exactly the process of tweaking an existing theme entails. We’re also planning future posts on the related topics of performance, security and interoperability.

Here’s what all we did to make “beBoldy”…

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Why WordPress?

Many months back we refined our core service offering from working on any PHP based website to concentrating on the most popular open-source CMS systems: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Magento. We recently announced narrowing our concentration to WordPress exclusively. Here’s why…

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Hello World!

Here’s our first blog post. It’s not going to be long winded or anything like that. It’s merely here to say hello and let all of you know that every once in a while, when we have both the time and something interesting to say, either Sean or myself will create more posts.

Oh, and just so we’re all on the same page, we’ve completely redone our business model as well as our website to reflect the change. Not all that long ago we were a PHP Development shop that took on any and all PHP related jobs. That means, of course, we worked on a myriad of content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla!, Drupal, CMS Made Simple, and WordPress.

This got to be quite tedious being that in order to deliver high quality service we had to become specialists at each CMS as well as non-CMS PHP powered site we worked on. Thus, being only a two person team (for now) we decided to pick one CMS and run with it.

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