I’ve recently started dabbling with WordPress frameworks in a bid to improve my development style and shorten the lifecyle.

Here’s a very interesting discussion that you might want to read if you are just getting into WordPress frameworks:

http://digwp.com/2010/07/the-frameworks-discussion/

1. Hybrid
2. Carrington
3. Genesis
4. Thematic

Hybrid seems to have the best support with Justin Tadlock being absolutely amazing in Hybrid’s forums.

Carrington appears to be the most suitable for client-work which many times requires totally custom designs and functionality.

Many developers have also reported that their skills have improved alot after they started using frameworks.

My most extensive framework experience is that of using Hybrid. I feel it’s important to make a distinction between a parent theme and a framework. A framework is more similar to something like CakePHP or JQuery, basically a library of useful functions that can help you develop a theme in a faster way than if you had to code everything from scratch. A parent theme is more useful when you just want to grab a theme and make some styling adjustments to it.

For developers who are doing mainly custom client work, I recommend finding a framework rather than a parent theme. For example Justin Tadlock has now released the Hybrid Core framework, which is a standalone framework you can include into your project. Then you can make use of all the useful functions it provides. The way I usually work is to start a theme from scratch, and import both the Hybrid Core framework and a custom framework I’ve created myself. My custom framework includes many functions I find myself using on many projects. So instead of redoing everything from scratch or having to search in the code of older projects, I have an always updated set of useful functions ready for use. Hybrid also provides a very nice barebones theme called Prototype, which sometimes serves as a very good platform to develop a site upon, using a child theme for style customisations. Bear in mind that if alot of custom structural changes are needed I would be better off starting a parent theme from scratch. But sometimes for fairly basic sites a Prototype child theme will enable me to rapidly develop the site.

I must also say that Frameworks can be tough to understand at the beginning. But persevere and most importantly, practice using a framework until you get the hang of it and start understanding how it can improve your workflow. In the initial stages I found support forums to be essential when I got stuck, and this is where Theme Hybrid excels. I have found the support to be nothing short of exceptional, with Justin replying himself to my questions most of the time. I don’t know how he does it but I’m definitely won over by Hybrid’s support plus it’s very clean code, from which you can learn immensely.