A few days ago (Sunday 21st march) on the WordPress facebook blog they released this post about the Google Summer of code (GSOC)and WordPress 3.0 sneek peeks. The Official release by WordPress where there are a couple of announcements, but the one of particular interest that was from the GSOC 09 by Daryl Koopersmith, and is called Elastic Themes.

The WordPress elastic themes generator

The generator can best be desribed as,

A visual theme editor and theme engine for WordPress. -  elastictheme.org/

Why the fuss?

Well if you have ever needed to move a very complex layout from a PSD or other image into a WordPress template, i am sure you can atest to the excitement and joy that can be had in merely trying to get the basic structure in place. Of course the advent of free WordPress theme frameworks like WPFramework, Thematic, The Hybrid Framework, and Carrington to name a few have definitely made theme development more structured and less involved. However, despite this you still have to get into the files and manually  do a bit of massaging.

Features

I think the best and easiest way to see just about everything the plugin can do is to check out some of the slides from WordCamp NYC 2009 that they put together.

With this plugin you are able to take a WYSIWG approach while simply using a mouse to click, drag and create pretty interesting column based layouts for your themes. Not only that but it also handles creating a new theme for you on the spot so that you can go and have a fully functional, multi-column, magazine or newsparer style theme in minutes!

I will already put a disclaimer here as i a not really a big fan of Artisteer, it reminds me a bit of the old templatemonster.com themes that were obviously machine generated, often very easy to see when you looked at the code, or tried to extend with relative ease.

Often times seeing is believing and luckily you can see for yourself just how it easy it get started and have your layout running in minutes, well according to the author One minute.

Elastic: One-Minute WordPress Theme

Having worked with Drupal i am not sure if there is anything that is around that you can do the same with so fast, and natively within WordPress. It is definitely an interesting plugin especially considering how far Javascript/AJAX/jQuery have come as well as a movement to a more CMS based system.

Conclusion

I think its an interesting project and seeing as you get paid $5000.00 to complete your GSOC project then it may actually be worth taking a look at, especially if the end result is a handy plugin the Elastic themes generator.

At the moment i am not sure how easy it will be to add components to the new themes like CSS frameworks such as 960.gs or the Blueprint CSS framework but it will be something to keep an eye on.

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Tags: facebook, Google Summer of Code, gsoc10, Wordpress 3.0

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