I see that the “new” functionality for WP 3.4 is already in the latest GitHub revision.

So feel free to delete my former comments, they’re really nonsense

There is a new site I have to do for a non-profit organisation, and I’m feeling a bit lazy to use a way-too-complex theme/framework, mostly because I *already* have a non-WP-compliant HTML design. Complex frameworks tend to impose CSS class names and so forth. Essence is lightweight and to the best of my knowledge doesn’t impose specific styles… so I might give it a try (again).

As for HTML5, I’d love to move to HTML5 but we would need backwards compatibility for browsers that don’t fully support it. I want to support IE8+, the latest Chrome, and then probably one version back on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

There ARE some HTML5.js files that should help (there’s one packaged with Essence already). If you convert Essence over to HTML5, I’d definitely work it into the official release.

Oh BTW… I know this might be asking too much, but… is there a good reason why Essence, being such a brand new theme (and hopefully having a long, long life ahead of it!), is still HTML4 and not HTML5?

I was thinking of rewriting all the code into HTML5 (it’s a good exercise for me) and possibly having a forked project for that (assuming I’m able to do that on GitHub — I took years to “upgrade” to Subversion and now that I’ve finally mastered it, it seems everybody is moving to GitHub hehe), but there might be several good reasons not to do that. I guess the main reason is that the majority of plugins which inject HTML into themes will use HTML4 and this might break everything?

/**
 * Theme Name:    Your Theme Name
 * Theme URI:     http ://essencetheme.com/?your-theme-url
 * Description:   Your Child Theme Description
 * Author:        Your Name
 * Author URI:    http ://essencetheme.com/?your-url
 * Template:      essence
 * Version:       0.0.1-your-version
 */

edit: There shouldn’t be spaced int he URLs, but they’re getting turned into clickable links and then the source of the entire link is being displayed.

You can then drop styles in that file and it will override or add to any styles in the theme.

I have a project that I should be finishing soon that uses it (personal project). As soon as I do I’ll be writing a (probably very long) post that has all my code, etc.

The first thing I did was to take a look at the overall structure. It seems that a lot of support has been built-in for several plugins, and I’m assuming there is a list of “recommended” plugins, since you clearly favour a few, enough to make sure there is some support for them. Is that list published somewhere?

The next thing is to figure out how to actually extend Essence on a specific project without messing up the “core” code. I’m assuming that (unlike other frameworks) the correct way to do it is to do a child theme; then I can just upgrade Essence by itself without messing up with the “core” functionality. Am I correct in assuming that’s the correct way? (I humbly admit I’m not very good with child themes, I tend to mess things seriously up that way )

Then I suppose that we need a place somewhere to do some documentation. At the very least, a small graph explaining the modified loop (assuming it’s a modified one!) as used by Essence. For example, I see the very useful split of loop.php into loop-post, loop-page, loop-attachment and so forth.

So, where do we start documenting Essence?