Bootstrap or Foundation Wordpress theme?

I've had fun with http://roots.io/starter-theme/

No you do not have to build a theme from scratch each time (although it's a fantastic idea to build your own starter theme - which is not that difficult if you follow the guides here). There are literally dozens of free themes that use bootstrap or foundation. There's also been several treehouse blog posts about the relative merits of each. Personally, I like Bootstrap because, while not semantic, the mark-up is a little easier for me to remember. Unless a client demands one or the other, I'd get really good at the one you prefer and stick with it until you know it cold.

For foundation: lots of friends have told me they use Joints http://jointswp.com/

other options worth looking into: http://html5boilerplate.com/ which is probably most useful for webapps, but is very lean especially compared to bootstrap and foundation. See http://themble.com/bones/ for a complete wp theme.

http://www.getskeleton.com/ --- not really a UI frame work but excellent grid system

roots.io is fantastic and probably the single best collection of current practices IF you use the bedrock stack. It also uses a theme wrapper which helps keep your code DRY but is very difficult to wrap your head around if you've been cranking out themes for clients the "old-fashioned" way.

There's also http://semantic-ui.com/ which deals with the big headache of bootstrap - ridiculous bloated markup. Div itis and insane class names. (I don't find it that difficult to work around, but I cede the point).

Again, just pick one and get great at it.

If you're comfortably with both Bootstrap and Foundation and you know how to integrate them into WordPress I would suggest theming from a blank theme.

The way I work in my projects is code the HTML, CSS and JS using Bootstrap, Foundation or my own framework and then integrate that code into a blank WordPress theme. This way you have control over every aspect of the site and you are less likely to run into problems because of the parent theme.

Chris Coyier from CSS tricks has a blank starter theme you can download for free, I've been using that one on every WordPress site I've made.

You could build a foundation using a framework and make child themes on that one, but keep the parent theme basic enough to be able to customize it for your project.

Hey Matt,

Since you are comfortable with both Bootstrap and Foundation I would suggest to go with Bootstrap. This is simply because Treehouse already has a course that shows how to implement Bootstrap design into your Wordpress website.

Thanks, Calvin