Introducing Beans: A Streamlined WordPress Framework

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If you develop websites and themes using WordPress, then you understand how much work it takes. Working from scratch makes you feel like you're trying to reinvent the wheel, so many developers use frameworks to speed up the process. Finding the right framework means a much easier development process.

This article will outline a new framework for developing WordPress sites, called Beans, and show how it's useful for creating WordPress sites without hassle.

Introducing Beans

Beans is a starter theme/framework which allows you to pick and choose the features you'll need to build your website, and trim away the parts you can do without. It's lightweight and fast, while giving you a lot of flexibility.

Beans makes content responsive and images adaptive, creating multiple versions of images automatically and serving up the right image for the device it's being viewed on. The content responds to the device as well, restructuring and reorganizing to best fit the device's display.

Beans is comparable to the Genesis Framework, which I've covered myself on SitePoint, so let's start by taking a look at how they are similar, how they differ, and where Beans shines.

Let's take a closer look at a few aspects of the framework, before comparing it with its closest competitor, Genesis.

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SEO

Beans is built to be SEO-friendly. Other themes and frameworks out there aren't semantic, and they aren't built with SEO in mind. Beans is built to be descriptive and semantic, making it optimized for search engines. You don't have to worry about whether your content meets the requirements for search engine indexing, it's built right into the framework. Beans is lightweight and optimized for mobile — two features that are vital for SEO success.

Child Themes

Beans uses and recommends using child themes to build custom sites. This means that when Beans is updated, your site doesn't break. The Beans team also provides a basic child theme to help you to get started.

Site Design

With Beans you can control the structure of each page globally or individually. You can set the layout of the site in the customize section of the WordPress admin. You can also control the layout on a per-page basis. You have the choice of one left or right sidebar, two left or right sidebars, one sidebar on both sides, or no sidebar at all.

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by James George via SitePoint