Beta version of baseScape theme is now deployed on GD Star Rating website. As you can see, theme has very simple design, but still has plenty of features built. And all that has produced some very interesting results in terms of speed and use of resources on the website.
Until today, GD Star Rating website run on eNews theme (ElegantThemes). And I have measured the impact of this theme and new baseScape. With same plugins active before and after baseScape is installed and same version of WordPress (2.9.2), website uses 2MB less memory: win for baseScape. To generate the page eNews theme needed 51 SQL query and 0.2 seconds to execute them. baseScape needs only 24 SQL queries and 0.07 seconds to execute them. This measurement is actually very acurate since the content on the front page is exactly the same for both themes (these numbers don’t include plugins and their queries). Another win for baseScape. And finally, all this caused that page generation time drops from 1.2 seconds with eNews to 0.7 seconds for baseScape. Another point for baseScape. I have also tested with Pingdom, and determined that large amount of time eNews was spending on generating thumbnail images with awful TimThumb where each image requires separate PHP thread, where baseScape uses much better thumbnail method and all is done in a single, main thread. baseScape: 4, eNews: 0.
So, check out the GD Star Rating website and see how the theme looks like and how does it feel using it. Check out the comments form with validation, contact form on every page, hidden on the left side of the screen, front page slider, social icons links with each post (built in the theme and highly customizable), main menu mixing categories and pages, jQuery powered breadcrumbs navigation and much more, all built in into the xScape framework.
GD Star Rating website will help test theme and the framework further, and more improvements will follow before xScape is released. If you notice any bugs, or have any suggestion, please leave a comment.
GD Star Rating: http://www.gdstarrating.com/
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Thanks, very useful!
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Hello,
Found this bug using IE7
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Thanks for reporting it.
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Hello,
Can you give us a quick update ?
How about the new menu functionnality that went in core ?
Regards,
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First theme is ready. I am in process of updating this site to handle themes, and I also plan to move website to VPS.NET over the weekend. So, you can expect theme released next week.
As for menus in the 3.0 core, they are already supported by the framework, I am still testing because they are still changing and fixing it, but be sure it’s going to be supported. Framework has own menu designer that I use on GD Star Rating website. Post thumbnails added in WP 2.9 are also supported.