Ultimate List Of WordPress CMS Starter Theme And Framework

WordPress is one of the most widely used content management system. over 20% of websites are powered by it. As a designer, building theme from scratch can be a burden but the use of WordPress theme frameworks may ease theme development by reducing the volume of work which may be needed in creating a backbone for your theme (usually by using PHP and WordPress Template Tags) and help you focus mainly on the theme design helping you to finish theme design in record time.
most WordPress theme framework are usually extended by creating a child theme.
Below are the list of some top WordPress starter themes and frameworks.

  • Genesis framework

    Genesis WordPress framework
    Genesis is a premium theme framework that empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. three reason to use this the framework are:
    Search Optimized – State of the art code and smart design architecture mean search engines clearly see your content. And with automatic updates, you never have to think about it again.State of the art code, smart design architecture, and easy Google Authorship identification make it simple for search engines to see what you.
    Turn-Key Designs – The Genesis turn-key designs give you an array of beautiful frames for your content. The design settings give you unprecedented control of the framework.
    Unlimited Everything – Unlimited support. Unlimited updates. Unlimited websites. There’s no “Developer Option” here. One low price entitles you to support, updates, and domains.

  • Thesis framework

    Thesis theme framework
    Thesis is one of the most popular premium theme frameworks, used on over 42,712 websites. There are two licenses, with the less expensive one only allowing use on a single website (the developer license can be used on an unlimited number of your own sites, with additional license fees for use on client websites).
    Thesis is powerful. It has a remarkably efficient HTML + CSS + PHP framework and easy-to-use controls that you can use to fine-tune each and every page of your site with a tactical precision that has never been possible before. The days of worrying about your in-site SEO are over—with Thesis, your strategy is “just add amazing content”.
    If you do not know coding not a problem. The Thesis option panels allow you to command your site with ease, while Thesis does all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. You’ve never had this much control over your site before, and this is precisely what makes Thesis indispensable to critical website owners all over the globe.
    Some of the feature that make thesis thick include:
    Get a Design You Love – Choose one of their pre-made Skins, and love it as is. Or add new functionality as you see fit without ever writing one line of code.
    Tweak Without Code – Forget plugins. Now you can drag and drop add-on functionality ANYWHERE in your WordPress design without ever touching PHP files or CSS files. You’re in complete control with Thesis 2.0.
    Customize at Will – Now anyone—yes anyone—can deploy complex CSS customizations without ever touching a CSS file. Find the package you want, upload it into Thesis, play with the options, and BAM! You’re done.
    Thesis Loads FAST! – ow that Google considers page load times in their search engine rankings, it’s time you get a theme that takes speed seriously.
    Get More Search Traffic – Thesis is compatible with every mission-critical SEO feature right out of the box. That means you can see an increase in click-through rates on your search results by 30% to 150% or more.
    Killer Support Forum – If you’re struggling with getting your site up and running, no problem. Thesis 2.0 and DIYthemes have your back. Our support experts are standing by in our forums, and they’re ready to answer your questions.

  • Catalyst theme framework

    Catalyst - Build A Website, Create Your Powerful Website with Catalystcatalyst pricing
    Catalyst is the ultimate WordPress tool to build a website. Even with no coding experience, you can use Catalyst to build your own fully functional website from the ground up. Unlike other theme frameworks, each Catalyst website looks completely different.
    How Catalyst Empowers You: Have the satisfaction of creating your own website, Build a website with the features and design you want, Control your website using our point and click interface, Focus on your business, not on learning how to code, Learn how to successfully grow your own web presence and Easy to learn website management.

  • Thematic WordPress Theme Framework

    thematic theme framework
    Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.
    Thematic Features

    1. Perfect to use as-is or as a blank WordPress theme for development
    2. Fully Search-Engine Optimized
    3. Extra widget-ready areas (13 in total) and more possible in your Child Theme
    4. Free and commercially supported Child Themes are available for upgrading the theme
    5. Includes a sample WordPress Child Theme for rapid development
    6. A wiki-editable guide to Thematic Customization
    7. Ready for WordPress plugins like Subscribe to Comments, WP-PageNavi, and Comment-license
    8. Fully compatible with All-In-One SEO and Platinum SEO plugins
    9. Multiple, easy to implement, bulletproof layout options for 2, or 3 column designs
    10. Modular CSS with pre-packaged resets and basic typography
    11. Dynamic post and body classes make it a hyper-canvas for CSS artists
    12. Editable footer text—remove the theme credit without harming the theme
    13. Options for multi-author blogs
  • ThemeHybrid Framework

    Hybrid Core: WordPress theme development framework
    Hybrid Core is a development framework with the purpose of giving you a solid PHP code base from which to build. It’s primary purpose is to make it quicker for developers to build new themes. Its features include breadcrumbs, galleries, pagination, enhanced featured images, drop down menus, post templates, and more.
    All WordPress themes and plugins available on Theme Hybrid are completely free to download and enjoy.If you’re a developer, you’ll love this theme. Hybrid offers 14 custom page templates, 9 widget-ready areas, lots of actions and filters to hook your functions to. Also, the available child themes are feature rich so starting a development process should be an easy task.

  • The UpThemes Framework

    The UpThemes Framework - UpThemes
    The UpThemes Framework is a A powerful, lightweight theme options framework that makes it possible for your themes to have amazing theme options within the WordPress dashboard.
    some of it features are:
    Settings API – The new UpThemes Framework takes advantage of the Settings API, making our theme options panel extremely lightweight and easy-to-use.
    WordPress-Standard Media Uploader – No longer a separate piece of functionality, the Framework now uses the built-in WordPress media uploader for enhanced security and less code overhead.
    Custom Layouts & Color Schemes – Many themes offer a choice of layout and color scheme. The UpThemes Framework makes it incredibly easy to select the layout and color scheme that’s right for your website.
    Live Theme Customizer – With the new theme customizer, the UpThemes Framework now allows you to preview every option, including instant header and background image updates.
    Customizable Header and Background Images – Easily update the logo and background image or color instantly!
    Multiple Language Support – Most themes come with multiple languages to choose from, and if not – we make it easy to add your own language.

  • HTML5 WordPress shell

    HTML5 WordPress shell
    If you’re looking to create WordPress themes using HTML5, the HTML5 WordPress Shell could be a great starting point. It can be used to create responsive themes, with media queries included for major devices.

  • Simon WP Framework

    Simon WP Framework
    It’s a WordPress Theme and WP Framework. The Mission: to assist in rapidly creating and deploying WordPress driven websites. It’s a blank theme that provides the most flexibility for creating child themes from Simon WP Framework. Theme comes with custom icons. This Framework is widget ready in the sidebar and in the footer. a run down of it features are:
    Screen SizeAs users adopt larger screens this WordPress Framework proves size does matter.
    Widget Ready Customized Theme with Widget areas within the Sidebar and the Footer
    Post Formats A piece of meta information that can be used by the Theme to customize its presentation.
    Child Theme Update the Framework directly or download the Child Theme as your starting point.
    Really Free Unlike other WordPress Frameworks that claim to be free, the goal here isn’t to sell memberships or Themes.
    Open Source Theme code base is open to programmers and designers to improve upon.

  • Gantry Framework

    gantry WordPress theme framework
    Gantry is a freebie by the RocketTheme dev team which consolidates their extensive theme-building experience into a simple yet powerful starter framework. Apart from the other frameworks listed here, Gantry is compatible with Joomla in addition to WordPress, which extends its usefulness beyond the confines of a single CMS.
    This is probably one of the most feature-rich free frameworks, boasting a configurable admin interface, dozens of widgets, built-in extendable AJAX, and many more, making it an extremely flexible instrument.
    the RocketTheme website offers a very detailed set of documents and tutorials on Gantry.

  • Whiteboard Framework for WordPress

    Whiteboard Framework for WordPress
    Whiteboard includes only core WordPress structure, which keeps it from being bloated and means that you won’t have to start each project by removing half of the code. Features include multi-lingual compatibility, the Less Framework and CSS3, HTML5, and it is lightweight.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.

  • SandBox Theme

    The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.

    Experienced developers and designers can accomplish almost anything with minimal work, thanks to the rich, semantic markup and profusion of classes dynamically generated by the Sandbox.

  • Carrington CMS WordPress Theme Platform

    Carrington is a CMS theme framework for WordPress that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates. Framework with full documentation, community forums to have Your problems explained, very friendly!

  • WP Framework

    A rapid popular theme development Framework for WordPress.

  • Reverie wordpress framework

    reverie
    Reverie is a versatile HTML5 responsive WordPress framework based on the Power of Foundation. a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.
    It is extremely easy to create your blog, CMS, brochure and any other kind of sites with Reverie.
    Reverie uses media query to adjust for all kinds of devices, including phones, tablets and computers. Reverie is also optimized for iPhone and iPad. Icons and loading images will be display when you save your website as a Home Screen app (example in the above image). Add this page to Home Screen on any iOS devices to see what I mean. You can resize this page to see how Reverie responses according to different browser resolutions.

  • Bones HTML5 WordPress Starter Theme

    Bones - The HTML5 WordPress Starter Theme
    The Bones framework comes in two variations: classic and responsive. The classic version is built on the 960 Grid. The responsive version gives you are starting point to design for multiple devices, with a stylesheet set up for media queries and a mobile first approach. Bones isn’t intended to be a framework for which you develop child themes. Instead, it is intended to be a project template. Get started working with the future of CSS today. Using LESS or Sass can speed up your development time when used properly. Bones gets you started by giving you a great starting point.
    Bones makes it easy to add Custom Post Types by giving you a well documented example. It also includes functions to customize the admin area for your clients. These are totally optional though, so if you don’t need them, delete them. No big deal.
    With a fantastic Mobile-First approach, Bones serves up the absolute minimum to small devices, saving precious bandwidth and speeding up load times.

  • skeleton WordPress Theme

    Skeleton WordPress Theme
    Skeleton is a simple responsive theme that can be used as is, or it can be used as a starting point for your own custom themes. It’s features include shortcodes for CSS3 buttons, column shortcodes with media queries, and more. It is a theme aimed at helping you build simple, uncluttered, useable, and mobile-friendly websites. Skeleton has styling for typography and form elements + includes simple tabs and accordions.

  • Roots WordPress Starter Theme

    Roots WordPress Starter Theme
    Roots is a WordPress starter theme based on HTML5 Boilerplate & Bootstrap from Twitter. three main feature that make root unique are:
    Write Less Code With the Theme Wrapper – Template markup is handled by base.php instead of being scattered across all template files like typical themes.
    Cleaner WordPress Code Output – We clean up lots of code that you’re used to seeing in WordPress themes.
    Cleaner WordPress Code Output – We clean up lots of code that you’re used to seeing in WordPress themes.

  • PressWork WordPress theme framework

    Press WordPress theme framework
    PressWork is a free, open source WordPress theme framework built for modern browsers using HTML5 and CSS3. Features include a drag & drop front-end editor for easy customization, the top 20 most popular Google Fonts and a responsive design using media queries so your site will look good on the iPad, iPhone and other handheld devices.

  • Foundation for WordPress

    Foundation, for WordPress, is a blank starter theme built on ZURB’s Foundation Framework v4.
    It features clean semantic code, support for custom headers and backgrounds and the WordPress Shortcode API.

  • HTML5 Reset

    Yet another HTML5 wordpress theme framework

  • Wonderflux WordPress theme framework

    Wonderflux - WordPress free, open source theme framework
    Wonderflux is a professional, free WordPress theme framework. It allows you to rapidly develop highly sophisticated, custom WordPress themes with just a handful of files (minimum is just 1 – style.css) using the principle of a Child theme. It has location-aware template parts that allow you to concentrate on the content, not the code. The framework comes with a fully dynamic CSS grid system, simple administration controls and over 100 display hooks.

  • Elastic Theme Editor

    Elastic Theme Editor | Elastic is a defunct visual theme editor for WordPress by Daryl Koopersmith
    There are several important stuff behind Elastic: a visual theme editor, a theme engine, and a set of protocols that link these two.
    It aims to bring a new approach to editing and creating themes which both developers and end-users will find easy to work with.

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