Gravy WordPress Framework Review

I was using my own WordPress framework to develop sites for over a year and I was pretty happy with it. On the HTML/CSS side of things it contained:

• a global reset using Eric Meyer’s CSS Reloaded
• base typography styles
• a skeleton main.css stylesheet that housed the basic layout elements that I use from one project to another.
• Internet Explorer conditional statements for different versions of IE.

In the theme itself, the WordPress core files had a large number of additions and changes that I had made over time to the base theme that I had used—K2.

In short, this setup allowed me to quickly and efficiently start developing websites with WordPress without having to do certain tasks over and over.

However, I realized that as WordPress kept adding features, my framework started to lag behind and I had to do additional work on each project, so I started looking for some help.

I ended up checking out a number of frameworks before settling on the Gravy WordPress Framework. In addition to having the features that I needed (see below) it did not have the huge overhead that something like Thesis would have. It did just the right amount of everything that I needed it to do, and not a lot of what I didn’t want.

Useful features of Gravy

Automatic Pagination

Without having to install a plugin, Gravy has automatic pagination of pages. This is really useful for me as one less plugin installation after installing WordPress means one less thing to remember and the theme is closer to working right out of the box.

Easier management of The WordPress Loop

The Loop is contained in one file that has a large number of conditional statements for all the different places WordPress will call it. I can make all the edits here and then posts works perfectly fine whether they’re on the homepage, a blog page, archives, or search.

Automatic navigation including bulletproof dropdowns

Out of the box the Gravy contains multi-level dropdowns using superfish. I don’t have to worry about cross-browser compatibility from the get go and it just works. I can then tweak it as needed to ensure it works with the design that I had in mind.

Comments

The comments are styled really nicely and the CSS is easy to customize to accommodate the design that you want. Nested comments are also implemented well.

Other features that I liked

Some other Gravy features that I liked:

• automatic keyword highlighting on the search results page.
• an author template that shows the user’s avatar and biography along with their posts which are also paged.

Why use a WordPress framework?

I could have made all of these additions myself over time, but why do it myself when it’s already done for me? Even though Gravy is commercial, at $20 it is easily worth the money, considering the hours it’s already saved me on two recent projects that I have completed. It’s also released under the GPL license, which means that you can use develop multiple client sites for that one time cost, again unlike Thesis.

No WordPress framework is perfect

I don’t think that there is an out-of-the box WordPress framework that would be perfect for everyone. I made a host of tweaks to the framework, moving over many of the bits of code that I had made to my previous framework. I ended up with a tight, highly efficient code-base for WordPress that allows me to develop sites very quickly.