Reptile v1.5 Available For Download
Note: This version will not work with our current skins. We are in the process of updating all of our skins and will make them available as soon as possible.
Reptile v1.5 is a WordPress theme framework that takes a revolutionary approach to theme development. Reptile gives you complete control over your site - from the HTML and CSS to the PHP functions. All other frameworks are a base theme that gives you hooks and/or pre-made layouts to assist in the customization of your site.
Reptile is more like middleware and sits between your skin (theme) and WordPress. While your theme can interact directly with WordPress we have created helper functions to make many of these tasks easier. For some of you this may seem kind of odd but the flexibility it provides is amazing!
New Default Skin - Komodo
We worked extremely hard on the typography for this skin and have developed a baseline that will serve all of our future skins. If you enable the custom stylesheet option in the control panel you will get a nice surprise!
We added some styles to the custom stylesheet to give you a taste of what you can do with the default skin. Ohh and did we mention the skin is built using the 960.gs CSS framework. Customizing will be extremely easy for developers familiar with the framework.
GPL
After talking with Jane Wells (@janeforshort) at WordCamp Atlanta we decided to GPL the framework. Our skins will not be free, but this will give experienced and aspiring developers alike an opportunity to build Reptile skins, modules, and libraries.
What About Existing Customers?
No worries! We have additional modules and libraries we have created that are only available to individuals that have purchased one of our skins. One example is our Typography library that allows you to set font styles and sizes from the control panel. If you haven’t seen our bSimple screencast you should take a few minutes to check it out.
Where To Start
First you need to download and install the theme. Afterward we recommend playing with the different options in the control panel. Once you’re comfortable there upload an image and set it as the post thumbnail for a post. You can control how the image displays on the main posts page, archive pages, and single post pages. For the latter, that control is available when creating and editing a post.
Our Next Steps
We will focus on updating our existing skins to Reptile v1.5 and continue to work on improving the framework. In addition we will update our help section to reflect the new version of Reptile and produce a few screencasts to help you all better understand the framework. As always we look forward to your feedback and comments.