The Theme Foundry has released their vision of a business WordPress theme, called Basis. Basis is yet another theme by The Theme Foundry that reiterates why I like having them as a partner. Basis has a content builder in it that allows site owners to easily create dynamic pages.
The content builder is pretty awesome. I installed and configured Basis with a home page template, using the content builder, in less than ten minutes. For an app, product, or small business, Basis lets you put a website together ridiculously quickly.
But what I like best is that all of the markup is stored both in the_content() and in post meta. This makes your content you create with Basis transferrable to another theme, and you only lose styles. This makes it a markup builder as much as anything, and the possibilities for how this concept could be transferred elsewhere are exciting.
I talked to Zack Tollman, the developer of the content builder, about Basis. I told him that this would get a lot of comparisons to drag and drop frameworks. He understood that, and it’s something The Theme Foundry talked about a lot before they did this theme.
It’s not a drag and drop theme that is made for businesses.
It is a business theme that had hard to arrange layouts that warranted a more complex layout UI that we were compelled to build.
Basis isn’t trying to be a framework. It’s trying to be a business theme. Their goal isn’t to target the drag and drop framework market. But I must say, the intuitiveness of the Basis content builder is impressive. In fact, it’s why I write this post. I’d love to see what the WordPress could learn from this for the CEUX (Content Editing User Experience) project. Unfortunately that project is on hold right now.
This video of the Basis content builder in action better shows how good it is:
I’ve seen a number of companies build template builders. iThemes Builder, WP Jump Start, Headway, and Pagelines come to mind. But Basis is a bit different. It’s not trying to be any more than a business theme, and the content builder is the solution they came up with for this theme. I like that.
I think it’s great to see innovation happening like this, but ultimately it should be partnered with projects like CEUX so that core has a canonical solution that can be used in any theme.
Totally agree Lance. It’s something we’re paying attention to, and would love for this to help push some ideas, code, and innovation up to core. I think a canonical solution would be amazing and it would be wonderful for Basis 2.0 to be powered by WordPress core 🙂
That’s neat. I watched the video first and was wondering about how a theme switch would go. Great to store the markup as content. How well does the visual editor handle editing that markup after switching themes?
I was thinking this would make a great plugin.
Great question Steve! The content is stored in the page’s `post_content` field, so if you chose to change theme, the content goes with you.
From some perspectives, it may make sense for this to be a plugin; however, we wanted something that our customers could just use out of the box. Our thinking is that this is a business theme with really nice layouts. In order for a customer to be able to build these layouts easily, s/he needs this type builder interface. Detaching the builder would make the theme feel incomplete to us.
Yes, this functionality (and all additional WordPress functionality, really), probably belongs in a plugin.
You could still bundle the theme and plugin together, obviously, but besides displaying content, a theme really needs to allow for complete portability.
Your workaround is great (I’ve never seen any other theme do this before), but you still wouldn’t really be able to take your presentation to another theme framework.
And the best way to audition a feature for core is definitely through a plugin, as opposed to a theme (because the functionality really does need to be able to be turned on and off when necessary).
Thanks Jason for the comment! I do not disagree that a plugin of this nature is something that would have great value. For us, it is all about delivering a tightly integrated experience for our customers. We want it to be easy for them to layout their sites and so far, it seems that this is doing the trick.
We discuss the theme/plugin issue at length internally and do comprehend the prevailing wisdom on this; however, we feel quite strongly that there is a lot value in having a layout builder directly in the theme itself. Asking customers to download and install a plugin after installing our theme is a bad experience.
Hopefully, the plugin dependencies problem in WP core will be solved someday and this will be a concern of the past.
I just wanted to comment on requiring the user to install a plugin being a bad experience. I’ve heard this a lot but I haven’t seen it being a problem myself. Did you guys offer a theme that requires a plugin and had bad feedback?
I have a couple themes that each show a notice asking the user to install one wordpress.org-hosted plugin. Both work without their plugins, just not fully. Because of the notice, the user is immediately aware he needs the plugin for the full set of features. With two clicks it’s installed and one more it’s activated (this could probably all be improved to one click).
I don’t recall any user complaining about the experience or being terribly confused and these themes have been used by thousands of people.
Creating very advanced functionality the lives inside this *one* theme seems so silly. You have four page components. That’s it. Otherwise, this is a very basic theme.
Turning this functionality into a plugin would have allowed for some really interesting applications. You wouldn’t have needed to abandon Basis, either–you could have made this plugin auto-activate along with the theme.
I dunno…there’s nothing wrong with the theme as it is, but after using it for four months, I just get the feeling that the decision to couple functionality with appearance was done to justify the $80 retail price.
For me, though, I’m done using the theme until I at least see a decent child theme, and so I feel like this $80 was probably twice what the theme should have retailed.
Just to follow up more on the “this should probably be a plugin” and “this should be done through CEUX” comments. We didn’t come into this and say “let’s build a drag and drop editor”. If we had, it would have been an entirely different outcome and process. Instead, we were trying to implement some very specific design patterns for small businesses looking to build a website. This gradually evolved into a drag and drop editor as we peeled layers off the problem and made it easier to use. Therefore, the drag and drop editor is tightly coupled to the design patterns of this theme. You couldn’t just remove it and “make it a plugin”. It wouldn’t be very useful, because it would be missing the tightly integrated design that makes it really special.
If we had decided to build a drag and drop editor from the start, instead of a business WordPress theme, we would have had a whole different set of criteria, scope, and problems. If we were building something alongside CEUX, we’d be working under a completely different set of constraints. On top of that, while a few of us at The Theme Foundry do contribute to core where we can, it isn’t something we can do full time and still pay salaries and operate as a business (I wish we could). So when someone says, that’s great, but you should have done it through CEUX, or that should probably be a plugin, it represents (to me) a misunderstanding of what this theme is (and what it isn’t) and why we actually built it.
Like I told Lance, I’d love to see this influence CEUX and we’re happy to contribute code to that project, but I don’t think we should have developed it in sequence with CEUX. That’s just not feasible from a business perspective (at The Theme Foundry anyway). I also think downplaying and discouraging innovation simply because it’s not done in core or alongside core, isn’t healthy. We all know there is plenty of room for core to be influenced by commercial projects (see WooThemes menus). It should be something we’re all encouraging, and then looking for the best parts (and code!) as candidates for WordPress core.
Yeah, I didn’t understand the previous comments. I love how you guys went about this on both the non-core and non-plugin fronts.
Innovation needs to happen outside of core. For us theme/plugin developers, it gives us a chance to build features without being tied down to some rule set and allows us to try out a lot of things that we might not get away with in core. It gives those features time to mature. It gives us time to put 1.0 into the hands of users more quickly, which I believe is the most valuable aspect of going this route.
On the “this should have been a plugin” subject, I completely agree with you. By just watching the video, you could see that it was tightly coupled with the theme. It’s a solution to a specific theme problem. It sounds like you guys are doing things the right way and keeping content portable too. If the content wasn’t portable, I’d be the first one calling you out. 😉
I’ve used this theme for a few months now and I’m finally moving over to another design. The four page components just didn’t lend themselves to enough customization.
The final straw came when I was trying to embed a javascript form and it couldn’t be done because the Basis editor stripped out the code.
The theme itself is okay, but at $80, it’s not really that impressive.
Had this been a plugin, I might have been able to take the tool over to another theme or at the least, I could have really used a new child theme. Unfortunately, there aren’t any child themes available and I’m no graphic designer, so I had to move on.
Love the idea of mixing better functionality, that’s usable for end-users and coupling it with good design. Looking forward to seeing more of this.
Thanks for introduction this brand new theme. It feels simple and nice in view. Also I found navigation was easier to access different pages.