An Informative WP East Session on Themes

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WP Themes Trends

Andy  McIlwain at WPMeetup East had a host of speakers on the topic of most useful WordPress themes. And the common element among all the speakers was the use of various strong Pagebuilders  combined with savvy Multipurpose themes. This is the state of the art for  Frontend Development in WordPress.

The MultiPurpose themes give you control of a Page/Post/Custom-post layout. This now  includes content sizing [ box or full-width], sidebar appearance [1, 2 or no sidebar ] and a range of controls on appearance. Users now can control   Page/Post copy like  title, feature image, author, publish date , comment counts etc.

Here is an example of Generate Press combined with Thrive Architect as PageBuilder.

Update: Here’s a video breakdown of the Beaver Builder Agency theme, also discussed during the meetup. (Thanks to Colin Cartwright for providing the link.)

Some of the better MultiPurpose themes offer control over the appearance of headers, footer and sidebars. In addition, these top themes also allow control over the content of the header, sidebar, and footer including such capabilities as menu, logo, title, and search field placement. See the following review for a look at Multipurpose Theme trends in much greater detail.

Highly useful are sticky menus with distinctive styling plus footers with various combos of widgets, form-fields, and text. Finally the better multipurpose themes allow users to install a default setting for the website but then override the default setting in any specific Page/Post/Custom-post type.

Summary

Clearly the various speakers were touting the use of frontend PageBuilders like Cornerstone, Divi and Beaver Builder with Multipurpose Themes. This combo allowed them to build a wide range of website types and layouts from Portfolio thru Corporate Business to eCommerce.

So now instead of searching through thousands of WordPress themes, savvy WordPress developers will be looking through 10-20 multipurpose themes and 10-12 page builders.

So as Automattic develops the new JavaScript Gutenberg page builder, the Multipurpose  theme and page builder’s have set an ever higher standard of features and performance for Gutenberg to match.

Finally,  congratulations for another well  designed and moderated meetup by Andy.