Project515.org – A Fork of Twenty Ten WordPress Theme

In 24 hours, my team at The Nerdery’s Overnight Website Challenge produced an amazing website for Project 515.  Out of 18 teams, we placed in the top 4 (they give an award to #1 and then #2-4 are given the label, ‘finalists’).

The new Project 515 website is among the finest I have participated in building.

Having become wary of WordPress theme frameworks*, we decided to use a theme with a drop-down menu and a code base that is coded to solid standards.  Alas, we settled on Twenty Ten.

Here is the Project 515 theme, which is a fork of Twenty Ten:

And here is the Twenty Ten default theme:

Overall, I would say our experience forking Twenty Ten was very positive, and I have since done the same a number of times.  We were able to focus on usability and WordPress core code (as opposed to framework hooks), which sped up our development and minimized our headaches considerably.

Because we started with a solid theme that used the WordPress hooks rather than custom framework hooks, we were able to focus our attention on features (such as SMS and calendar integration) as well as fancy design elements (jQuery flip effect).

*Theme frameworks suck.  I have an article coming out about this soon.