Hi,
I have made a few websites in php with laravel. For some future projects i wanted to use wordpress as a cms, and design my own theme from scratch. I came across your framework, and i have a good feeling with it, but i find it for somebody new to wordpress, it lacks some tutorials to get to know the framework.
Also , what worries me a bit is that this is an app written and maintained by one person. How can you assure the people that are going to spend time in learning the framework, that you won't stop from one day to another?
I'm looking at genesis right now, but keep coming back to check out your framework and try to convince myself this is a better choice.
Hi Balam and welcome to Beans community!
I think at this stage tutorials are the number 1 request. While Beans number of users is significantly high and growing, it is mostly developers and a lot of people would love to see more on boarding tutorials to fast track the learning curve and quickly achieve amazing things. Our philosophy is that we don't do things half way and strive for quality, the plan was have a set of top notch video tutorials record and released in 2017, founded by donations. What we didn't see coming is Beans rapid growth and I believe that tutorials are fundamental sooner. So I am planning on taking from my own time to record a set of tutorials myself even though I am by no mean a screencast expert. I don't have an ETA for that but I do hope to get to it soon 😉
Regarding Beans being driven by one person, I completely understand your concern and the best I can do is to give you a few facts which might be convincing, or maybe not in your case. The first is about Beans growth and popularity. It is growing rapidly and used for big corporate websites. We expect that to continue, even more when tutorials will be released. At this stage I haven’t been looking into getting more people to drive the project and the community has been participating to helping on the forum, a few core code contribution and some financial donation (it is open to anybody to contribute with what ever they do best). That said I do plan on getting more people onboard in the future. The other thing to look at is how new Beans is. It is a fact that Beans is newer and not as established as Genesis, that said every big project has to start somewhere and the Beans growth is impressive since the launch in august last year which is very promising. Being completely free and open source is another a big plus over Genesis and other framework, it doesn't belong to one person, it belongs to the community and even to you. You will also notice that Genesis development has significantly decreased since StudioPress is dedicating most of their ressources to Rainmaker.
Why should you use Beans over Genesis or other themes? There are so many arguments as why Beans is better but I am going to try and keep it short. The main reasons are because it is faster, more flexible, you have control over every single part of Beans and you will be able to build from simple to complex website very quickly once you master it. In fact Beans API is so complete and powerful that you can pretty much achieve anything without additional plugins. The best part is that you have control to use only what you need on a per page basis so there is no bloat what so ever.
I hope that helps you making the right decision according to your situation and needs 😉
Hey! Thanks for the reply. I'm a graphic designer that likes to get his hands dirty when it comes to coding and learning new things , I'm new to wordpress, although i have a few years of expierence in php oop and mvc patterns like i said before. I'm watching and reading some genesis tutorials now in the hope i can understand more of how wordpress and frameworks build on wordpress work and understarnd more of this open source framework. I guess the main principles are the same as their both build for wordpress, because it have a feeling this one is more my kind of flavour.
Laravel was also build by one person, and look at the community now, but i think their succes is mainly thanks trough laravel and jeffrey way that teaches the framework.
All you need is a starter tutorial to build one page from scratch , it doesn't have to be video, just some lines to get people started and hooked.
Hope to come back here pretty soon.
***edit
Ok, after watching some videos on how frameworks handle wordpress, i just realized what i'm looking for is not a framework but theme development from scratch with something as underscore_s , there i allready know php oop.