Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework

Whiteboard - A Wordpress Theme Framework

When designing Wordpress themes, a large amount of time is spent writing the same code over and over again. I found it annoying. Granted, I know there are themes out there like Elliot Jay Stocks’ Starkers Theme (which I used), but none of them were quite to my style.
Whiteboard is the result.

The Whiteboard theme is the basic framework of Wordpress.

It is designed to speed up the process of designing and coding a Wordpress theme by eliminating the time spent on Wordpress’ back-end PHP that is used in every theme.

Whiteboard is clean, noted, and compact (only 76KB in size - unzipped!). It includes all the standard PHP tags and PHP files needed for a Wordpress theme - plus a few extras.

It’s free - no strings attached

Feel free to use it for commercial and non-commercial ventures.
You don’t even need to include a “designed by” link! (though I would appreciate a link… )

Files Included: 404.php, archives.php, archives.php, categories.php, comments.php, footer.php, functions.php, header.php, index.php, page.php, search.php, searchform.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and style.css.

Extra Features:
Categories Page Template
Archives Page Template
Pagination Posts
Socialization Links (Technorati, Stumble it!, Digg, delicious, Twitter, Yahoo, reddit, Blogmarks, Google, and Ma.gnolia.)

Now includes a list (however shot it may be) of all the included divs.

Download Whiteboard Download Whiteboard now! (downloaded over 7,300 times!)
Now download version 1.0.4!
Fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7

 

67 Responses to “Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework”

  • Nice! Looking forward to trying this out, I’ve been building using the “default” theme for ages, which means I just keep stripping out the same useless code bits over and over every time :-)

     

  • You don’t happen to have an example of this anywhere do you?

     

  • very nice, can’t wait to test it :D
    thanks

     

  • I do not have an example up at this point.
    If you want, I could get one up!

    Hm…
    Would anyone happen to know of a plugin or something that allows test pages?
    I suppose I could try Google though…

     

  • Now this is a theme that should be created.. The sandbox theme was filled with excess rocks and sticks which made playing dangerous work, congrats and I will definitely download and use :)

     

  • [...] Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework [...]

     

  • you should put a download count here ;)

     

  • [...] 平常大家在为wordpress做主题的时候大多都是在自带的主题上进行修改，难免有不少垃圾代码存在，而且很多时候都在做重复的代码工作。当时就考虑过，是否应该整理一个只有一些基础预设的干净主题。没想今天还真看到一个 — Whiteboard。 [...]

     

  • Yeah, I’ve been very curious to see how it’s done…
    but last time I added a download count (for PIXELATED), it wouldn’t download.

     

  • I haven’t looked at it yet, but, it’s an interesting idea. I tend to work off one of my own. However, this might be a better idea, as I tend to have to strip quite a bit away before using.

     

  • [...] Whiteboard is a free Wordpress framework by Brian Purkiss of Plainbeta.com. It is designed to take the leg work out of creating a Wordpress theme. It’s free with no strings attached so you can use it for commercial and non-commercial ventures. Brian has even been nice enough to say that you don’t even have to give him a link back for his efforts. Well worth a visit for anyone interested in Wordpress themes. [...]

     

  • [...] for details sake there are a bunch of other starter/framework themes you can check, most notably plainbeta’s Whiteboard, Darren Beale’s WordPress Naked, Elliot Jay Stocks’s Starkers, and ThemeShaper’s [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework Free Starkers Wordpress theme Sandbox minimalist theme [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework Free Starkers Wordpress theme Sandbox minimalist theme [...]

     

  • Thank you very much for this. It’s very useful.

     

  • [...] Whiteboard is a free WordPress theme framework. It contains all the necessary tags and files, plus a little bit extra. Unfortunately there is no demo available on the site. I’ve downloaded it and it really does give you a blank theme with just the basics (see image below). [...]

     

  • [...] auf dem “Whiteboard” von Brian Purkiss habe ich ein eigenes Layout kreiert und mich sogleich auch mit der [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard - A Free WordPress Theme Framework [...]

     

  • I can’t find Tags.php here, can you please let me know when this will be available?

    Thanks for this framework.

     

  • Hey Brian, I’ve been in and out of changing themes for awhile cause I’ve never really found one that is set for me that I like, So I wanted to start working on my own. I downloaded your files but besides that I don’t know were to start =(

    DO I start buy designing a layout or something, how do I get the images or what?

    It might be a cool post for you to do sometime, just explaining how to start designing using your whiteboard theme.

     

  • VERY good advice Jeremy!
    I think I shall actually do such a post in the next few days…

    But I’ll still give you a brief summary of my workflow.

    Step 1: Make a list of all the features/pages/images/etc that will be included in the website. Be as specific as possible.
    Step 2: Sketch out a rough layout on paper.
    Step 3: Create the website’s layout in Photoshop.
    Step 4: Use MAMP (http://www.mamp.info) to host Wordpress and my Whiteboard theme locally.
    Step 5: Code everything into Whiteboard locally. (building straight off Whiteboard eliminates having to transfer the code from a static layout into Wordpress format - like I used to have to do)

     

  • Cool I’ll have to start doing that, going to be very very gradual though, Im not good at designing from scratch, I’m a modder lol

     

  • Hi brian,

    any news about tags implementation. i am also playing around with your theme and show you some GREAT designs :p

     

  • Jeremy: I’d love to see what you come up with! And if you ever need any help, feel free to shoot me an email!

    Christene: I went to add Tags.php - and I realized that the tags show in Categories.php as well as the categories.
    So I am going to opt to not add a Tags.php file.

     

  • Has anyone else had trouble activating this theme? When I add it to my themes directory, it doesn’t show up on my Themes page, and there’s no way for me to activate it.

     

  • There appears to be a compatibility issue with the latest version of Wordpress (2.6.2).
    I have no clue what the problem is - i’ll work on it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

     

  • This one’s perfect! It’s a pain stripping out all the unnecessary codes when working on a new wordpress theme. This will surely be a big help. Will be using it on my next WP development.
    Thanks!

     

  • I haven’t opened the zip yet, but have been searching a long time for a template that I could add my choice of backgrounds, colours, etc, even tho others make nice templates the colours, headers, flashing backgrounds, etc are not just what I was looking for or should I say “me”
    This being what most people want to achieve, to personalize it making it “them”
    So I’m looking forward to seeing if I can work it all out.

    Thank you, thank you, for sharing your work.

    You know you could be just some kind of Wonderful :)
    think I’m just gonna have to bookmark your blog

     

  • [...] Whiteboard It is designed to speed up the process of designing and coding a Wordpress theme by eliminating the time spent on Wordpress’ back-end PHP that is used in every theme. [...]

     

  • @Cecily: I had the same problem when trying to enable the theme on my localhost install. The solution was to check the rights of the whiteboard theme folder and its contents. When that was solved, it showed up like it’s supposed to.

     

  • Hi,

    I have only been using Wordpress for a few weeks after playing around with some fully developed themes I decided to try and create my own. I installed WAMP, so that I could but Wordpress on my own PC, so I can test everytthing locally.

    Whilst looking for advice, I found your site, the Whiteboard template has proven to be invaluable.

    I dont know whether its a big deal but I notice that you have the opening & closing HTML & Body tags in separate files, this feels like it creates an uneccessary degree of instability.

    And the more I think on it the more inclined I am to put all the header info in to index.php and the other main pages.

    Nick

     

  • Nick
    The HTML & Body tags need to be in separate files to allow all the separate files to work together since they’re all needed.
    As long as you include the “Header” and “Footer” PHP Tags in each of the pages, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

    As for the Header Info, if you move it from header.php, then that info won’t be on any of your post pages, regular pages, etc.
    But then again, you may want to specify things for each page - but that’s too much work for me. Each to his own I guess.

    If those strategies work, please feel free to come back and share how they did/didn’t!!! I would love to hear how it goes!

     

  • Brian,

    Thanks for your advice.

    You said “The HTML & Body tags need to be in separate files to allow all the separate files to work together since they’re all needed.”

    and

    “As for the Header Info, if you move it from header.php, then that info won’t be on any of your post pages, regular pages, etc.
    But then again, you may want to specify things for each page - but that’s too much work for me.”

    Yes indeed, if the index and other pages where to have the opening and closing html & body tags then I would have to restructure things things to get the right content, and that restructuring would be even more extensive if the head info was to included in each file.

    Since there are obviously lots of css ‘decoration’ issues to consider I would rather avoid doing stuff that doesn’t need to be done.

    I’ll comment again as I progress.

    Nick

     

  • Great framework to start with. Doesn’t has anything extra that is unwanted.

     

  • Any issues with this working with 2.7+ ?

     

  • [...] Whiteboard 免费的 WordPress 主题框架 [...]

     

  • Just started exploring the world of WordPress Frameworks so I’ll be checking this out - see what all the fuss is about :)

     

  • Hi,

    I haven’t been able to do any work recently with the Whiteboard theme. However I haven’t abandonded my interest in improving my Wordpress knowledge. I have installed the latest WP ver 2.7, and more importantly I have bought the latest edition (pub Dec 08) of Wordpress for Dummies which covers this new Wordpress version.

    Bought thru Amazon (natch) it is well worth the few $s if you are also a beginner like me (or even an expert!)

    Good luck to all you whiteboarders.

    Nick

     

  • Brian,

    Thank you for this. I am an experienced coder, but new to WordPress, PHP and CSS. I have largely worked in various C based languages which so far has made transitioning to PHP fairly painless.

    CSS seems to be something requiring the gathering of a lot of hands on experience as there seems to be the “standard” and then whatever the browser builders felt like implementing. Hands-on time will fix this.

    My real issues have been about trying to eliminating the “noise” in implemented templates so that I could determine the basics of the WordPress implementation strategy.

    What you have supplied here is very valuable in this regard and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to get an idea of how WordPress is wired up.

    Trying to learn by messing with fully implemented templates is a great way to drop a lot of frustrating and unproductive hours down a black hole.

    Thank you ever so much for saving me from this fate.

     

  • [...] (http://plainbeta.com/2008/05/20/whiteboard-a-free-wordpress-theme-framework/) [...]

     

  • [...] a theme, you’ll probably want to check out a blank/barebones WP theme. Here’s a couple: Whiteboard [...]

     

  • Hey Brian, thanks for the theme, it’s a great platform for restyling, just a heads up though I think there’s a missing closing on the single.php for the div.post

    Mark Roberts
    January 19th, 2009


     

  • Great framework to start with.

     

  • Thank you for this.

     

  • Hey

    I’m looking at the searchform.php file now, and the input form has value=”Search”, but this value is not appearing when rendered in a browser…

    I removed the onFocus=”this.value=”” to see if that changed things, but no success. I also changed it to onFocus=”this.value=’Banana’” and it shows the word Banana when a user clicks in the search field… but still no “Search” value.

    Am I missing something? I can’t think why its not showing up.

    C

     

  • [...] Whiteboard -http://plainbeta.com/2008/05/20/whiteboard-a-free-wordpress-theme-framework/ [...]

     

  • [...] WhiteBoard - Free WP Theme Framework [...]

     

  • How about a place people can post links to their sites designed using Whiteboard? I would love to see what people achieve using your framework!

     

  • [...] reinvent the wheel when you can use a blank theme: found here , here , and a whole list of them [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard [...]

     

  • [...] 平常大家在为wordpress做主题的时候大多都是在自带的主题上进行修改，难免有不少垃圾代码存在，而且很多时候都在做重复的代码工作。当时就考虑过，是否应该整理一个只有一些基础预设的干净主题。没想今天还真看到一个 — Whiteboard。 [...]

     

  • Great, great work.

     

  • [...] Whiteboard 免费的 WordPress 主题框架 [...]

     

  • [...] where Whiteboard comes in.  Whiteboard is a Wordpress theme with no CSS and no design.  Just data and basic HTML [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework [...]

     

  • [...] 5.Whiteboard - A Free Wordpress Theme Framework [...]

     

  • [...] 5.Whiteboard - 一款免费的 Wordpress 主题框架 [...]

     

  • [...] Simger基于Whiteboard这个免费的空白主题。 [...]

     

  • [...] 因为昨天下了个WordPress的空白模板Whiteboard，本来只是想研究下的，后来竟然花了一个晚上把突然来的灵感做成现在公布的这个主题：“Le Mag”。再说Whiteboard这个空白模板还真不错，省了我很多时间，直接拿它编写CSS就可以了，上手容易，所以这个新主题的PSD我也只完成一半就直接coding了。 [...]

     

  • [...] based this theme off the Whiteboard theme by Brian Purkiss. He did a great job breaking the theme down to its most basic components. I [...]

     

  • [...] this one – I wrote the theme practically from scratch.  The basic framework coding is from Whiteboard, and uses a grid-layout from [...]

     

  • [...] Whiteboard – Within the same school of thought as Starkers, this framework is another blank theme type. [...]

     

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