Site themes in the time of Backbone.js and Bootstrap

03/08/13 22:19:00    

By Michael Mealling

Earlier tonight a friend asked an interesting question. Given a Wordpress theme are there tools to make translating that theme to another platform. In the past this has been how many web designers have made their living. But the strong trend toward the View part of a site living more and more in the browser may mitigate that issue entirely.

There are now several theme sites for Twitter Bootstrap: wrapbootstrap.com and bootswatch.com. Apparently now that you can use Backbone.js with Drupal it looks like CMS engines like Wordpress and Drupal will become simple controllers and models.

If that is the case then themes become very difficult things if View parts of the design aren't done very carefully. If the semantics of the View live in the same set of code as the theme it becomes very tempting to comingle the two.

I sincerely hope someone has a design here because theming could get very ugly very fast.