Woes of the CMS: the open source theme or starter project

James Stone
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

The final reason that a CMS buildout is challenging is that often starter themes and starter projects were not created with your project in mind. Often these themes are “labors of love” started by a lone designer or developer with a passion for CMS + something else (like Bootstrap) and they just went ahead and put it together. Most of the time they might have a lot of knowledge on one area, but they are often not an expert at both. This is because rather than use a tried and true solution, they took their latest interest and tried to integrate it with their long time passion. This usually results in poorly documented, over engineered (on one end), and extremely opinionated examples.

In some cases projects are created for agency use, or released by a commercial core team. Although on the surface this might sound like great news as apposed to the hobbyist, but these are also not without their faults. The issue is that most agencies or commercially driven open source projects usually have some sort of hidden (or not so hidden agenda). That is great if it aligns with yours, but in this day and age of the pivot, this can change in an instant.

The solution to this problem is quite simple. It doesn’t matter if you have an agency that does a buildout across 5 different platforms (which is crazy) or you are a WooCommerce specialist cranking out the next greatest e-commerce WordPress sites. The solution is to create your front-end code and CSS (Sass) in isolation, to make short work the issues presented with a CMS buildout.


Originally published at James Stone.

    James Stone

    Written by

    Design Systems Engineering — ZURB Foundation Specialist

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