Theme generator for WordPress
Linda Di Geronimo · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2013
Platforms such as WordPress are increasingly used by professional Web developers and by casual users with few or no background skills in web development.There are 68 million WordPress websites in this moment on the internet, and currently this platform counts over three hundred million people who are reading WordPress blogs.Even if the platforms are extended and redefined to be more accessible to a larger number of users, sometimes they are based on models that are not reusable or not well-formed.These platforms use the concept of theme to identify or represent the website's look & feel.Though, the concept of a theme is not precisely defined, and does not clearly identify what makes a theme and what does not.For these reasons, it is important to focus on these kinds of tools trying to improve them by defining more formal models.A lot of theme generators for such platforms now exist on the Web to help users create new themes without having skills in web development and without knowing what a theme precisely is.As studied in this thesis, theme generators have limitations even if these tools can help the users develop a theme that they like.They usally allow users to customize only static components in a theme (such as font color, logo image etc.) and they do not allow the modification of dynamic functionalities (such as Javascripts and PHP scripts) that are the main parts of many website.The thesis presents X-TG, a theme generator for WordPress that allows users to create new themes for WordPress following a well-defined meta-model.This meta-model gives a formal structure to the theme, based on clearly-defined basic components to allow the reuse between different X-Themes.Moreover X-TG, unlike other theme generators, allows users to insert and customize more complex elements.In a task-based user study, we investigated the potential of X-TG.The results showed that the users, without having technical skills, were able to develop a WordPress theme following a mockup in a few minutes.Moreover, the participants of the study, were satisfied with the theme generated and appreciated the opportunity to customize it with complex functionalities.The users estimated that coding the same theme manually would have cost hours instead of minutes.