GavickPro Abandons Theme Framework in Favor of WordPress Customizer

GavickPro is a unique theme shop that creates both Joomla and WordPress themes. Each theme they produce is developed for both platforms. The shop was first established in the Joomla community and then branched out into WordPress.

Up until recently, every WordPress theme GavickPro created was based on the GavernWP Framework, which was designed to match its Joomla counterpart in functionality while providing WordPress-specific options. Consequently, the framework had a difficult time gaining traction and was confusing to WordPress users.

Lee Batten, head of consumer support at GavickPro, announced today that they will be abandoning the GavernWP Framework in favor of using the WordPress customizer:

The widget-heavy design of our themes made installation frustrating for inexperienced users. For this reason, we have decided to abandon the GavernWP Framework as the baseline for our future themes, and instead move away from frameworks altogether.

Batten said that the team will now opt for using the native customizer for handling options and settings in their future theme releases. “Things such as slideshow images, colors, backgrounds, fonts and more will be selectable within the theme customizer area of the WordPress backend with live changes visible as you make them, for a more comfortable and visual creation experience,” he said. The team will also be scaling back the number of widgets required to make their themes operational.

Perfetta: A Free Blogging Theme That Relies Solely on the Customizer

To demonstrate the new shift toward the customizer, GavickPro is releasing Perfetta, a free WordPress blogging theme. Perfetta makes use of the customizer to provide an easy way to select fonts, colors, layouts, background images, and additional features.

GavickPro is next in line to follow the folks at ThemeFurnace, Array, and other theme shops in ditching custom options frameworks and betting heavy on the WordPress customizer. One of the major benefits to going this route is that themes utilizing the customizer don’t require as much documentation, as WordPress users are generally familiar with this feature.

Customers have so far responded positively to the change. “Any proprietary framework seems rather clunky compared to the built-in WordPress customization system,” one commenter remarked in response to the announcement. In this highly competitive WordPress theme market, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your theme designs are or how many pages of documentation you create. Customers will resist your product if it feels clunky to customize. The team at GavickPro will be completely revamping product documentation in the coming days to reflect the changes and to help users more easily customize their websites.