Ever wanted to know how options are implemented with WordPress? Through lots of tutorials, I’ve finally been able to make a theme that had some options in the backend to make it easy for users/clients to change up colors, the width of the site, link colors, and simple things like that.

Ares Framework brings you the simple theme but with a Theme Options Page for the WordPress admin. (Download link at the bottom)

About the Framework

I’ve tried my best to comment everything, and certainly it’s great to know some little PHP or coding logic to understand how I did most of it. But, I’m not going to spend too much time talking about this one because, I have the last framework in production which will contain more of a documentation behind the setup I chose, and a little navigation behind the scenes.

Reminder that it is not a real “finished” theme. It’s just a developing theme, so there are errors, browser compatibility errors, and maybe extra lines of codes that aren’t needed. However, the theme does work, and for the most part is stable enough to release. If there’s anything major, like it completely didn’t zip, or a file is definitely missing, let me know and I’ll re-look into it.

Some Features

There’s a temporary demo here. It’s basically the Athena Framework, but with an options panel in the WordPress admin. The options are stylized minimally, and of course you can add more options or take them out.

There’s a PHP file for CSS which is imported so that you can use it for any changes in CSS as well as my framework files are located in one folder for the most part (labeled cle-framework). This is to ensure an organized and clean work and everything dealing with the framework is in that folder (besides the PHP CSS file, which I believe is in the includes/css folder).

Not much to say about this theme. If you have any problems with it, suggestions on better coding, certainly just leave a comment and I’ll check it out.

Outside Resources

I’m not taking a great deal of credit for doing this on my own, or I did everything in it, so here are the resources I used to complete this theme and theme options. I give lots of credit for them and releasing their knowledge and resources for free, and so that’s why this theme is out there for free for future wordpress developers that would like to take their theme to the next level with theme options.

How to: Create a Theme Options Page for your WordPress Theme

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to that site, and copied their code and dissected one by one. It’s definitely the right tutorial to start your foot off wet when dealing with theme options. Check out the comments as well for different problems and fixes.

Create and Options Page for your WordPress Theme

The tutorial probably looks the same, but again, I believe the comments here helped me strip slashes from html input in my text fields. Good resource to look in.

White Board Framework

Probably my favorite blank wordpress framework. It really just gave me the basic functionality of a wordpress theme and I was able to put what I want in it. By doing that, I’ve been making sites/blogs with my framework and it increased production time on so many levels because I can almost type out all the classes and ids that I put by heart. It’s great to have your own framework, and so if you need a blank one to get rid of extra things, White Board is the way to go.

After Thoughts

I hope you enjoy the framework. I’m hoping that it’ll be easy to understand and go through to make your modifications. If you guys did anything cool, show it off here. And, in about a month or so check out my new theme/framework, which is going to have a few more page templates like a portfolio, or home page so that it can start to look like a real site. Thanks for checking my site out and good luck with your WordPress developments.

Download Ares Framework