How to Create Drag & Drop WordPress Themes
If you want to start a wordpress website but you don’t know HTML and CSS you depend on your programmer. For every small thing you want to change you have to call him again, ask him to do, wait until he reach the computer and then see the changes to see what is to be done next. That’s a really slow process.
But there are solutions that can help you to draw your own wordpress theme without any HTML, CSS or PHP knowledge. You can simply create themes with drag and drop.
How is that ? Well, the guys at Pagelines developed a theme framework called Pagelines Platform Pro where you simply edit or create a new theme by dragging and dropping elements.
To be more clear, what you have to do is to open the visual editor and first select the number of columns you want to have, their width and height and to arrange them accordingly. The second and final step is to start adding visual elements to the content areas your created ( header, main content, sidebar1, sidebar2, footer ).
You can add anything to your newly made template: images, text, buttons, links, menus, and even more advanced stuff, sliders, ajax forms. All you have to do is to drag them into your template ( in the visual editor ). The fun part is that you don’t have to create any elements, you just set the parameters and drag them, like you do when managing widgets, the only difference is that here you can really feel where they should be placed.
As the name says, the creators of the framework name it platform, but they refer to as a framework. Well, the truth it is a platform, you install it and you build on top of it, but they still call it framework because you can start from scratch, build a brand new theme with their tools and already made elements and you’re done.
So, if you ever wanted to create your own template and HTML and CSS seemed too hard to be learned, or you was so busy with your creative work and never had time to learn those alien languages, then here is your chance to prove to the world that you are the most creative people.
I’ve heard many many times people saying that they want to prove that a website can be done without any HTML and CSS knowledge. They used Photoshop or other image editing software and then they exported it for web, resulting in some images arranged in a page to assembly the original big image. But that’s not a website, and can never be a website.
Things have changed now and there are options available to make a wordpress theme from scratch, take benefits from the great WordPress platform with all programming behind, get advantage of all plugins, and all with no coding, no PHP, no HTML, no CSS.
You can get Platform PRO from Pagelines website.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 13th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
I’m using dreamweaver to visually edit wordpress themes.
December 14th, 2010 at 8:30 am
Dreamweaver is also good for editing themes, but since the content is dynamic, when you edit with dreamweaver you can’t see what your website will look like exactly when you’re done. I don’t see the advantage of using dreamweaver instead a simple text editor.