Stuart Duff

Since mid 2011 responsive web design “web designs that automatically scale to fit various sizes of screen resolutions” has seen an explosion in popularity with developers. This has lead some nice wordpress developers to take the time and create responsive wordpress theme frameworks for you to use in your own wordpress designs which can save you a lot of time not re-inventing the wheel. Best of all these wordpress theme frameworks listed in this post are all free to download and use in your projects and with mobile web browsing becoming more popular moving to a responsive design sooner rather than later will be beneficial for you website redesign.

Roots WordPress Responsive Theme Framework

Roots is built with the HTML5 Boilerplate, various CSS frameworks, and is hNews microformat ready

You get all of HTML5 Boilerplate’s markup (but we do place JavaScript in the header to avoid any plugin conflicts). You get most of HTML5 Boilerplate’s incredibly powerful .htaccess directly from the theme. You get all of HTML5 Boilerplate’s style.css.

If you’re into CSS frameworks (you don’t have to use one), we’ve included the following: Blueprint CSS, 960.gs, the 1140px Grid, Adapt.js, Less Framework 4, Foundation by Zurb, and Bootstrap by Twitter.

Blog posts (single.php and any loop.php’s that reference posts) are based on the hNews microformat as recommended by Readability’s Article Publishing Guidelines.

http://www.rootstheme.com/

Foundation WordPress Responsive Theme Framework

Foundation is an easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device. The wordpress version combines ZURB’s Foundation Framework and HTML5 Boilerplate.

The Grid lets you lay out pages quickly and logically with a flexible, nestable system. Even better, the Grid can be whatever size you need — it’s easily adapted to any size screens, from phones to TVs.

Foundation includes dozens of styles and elements to help you quickly put together click-able prototypes, that can then be adapted and styled into polished production code. Forms, buttons, tabs, all kinds of good stuff.

The Grid lets you quickly put together page layouts for mobile devices and the desktop. You don’t need two different sites — the Grid is built to create a rock-solid experience on all kinds of devices with the exact same markup.

https://github.com/drewsymo/Foundation

Reverie WordPress Responsive Theme Framework

Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of devices. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standard and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for Search Engine while at the same time improve readability.

It is extremely easy to create your blog, CMS, brochure and any other kind of sites with Reverie. You can see some samples on ZURB and how they make these prototypes. Did I just mentioned Reverie works well with bbPress 2.0, even without styling?

With the power of Foundation, Reverie uses media query to adjust for all kinds of devices, including phones, tablets and computers. Reverie is also optimized for iPhone and iPad. Icons and loading images will be display when you save your website as a Home Screen app (example in the above image).

http://themefortress.com/reverie/

Yoko WordPress Responsive Theme Framework

Features and Documentation

• (compatible with 3.3) for WordPress 3.1 +
• Cross-browser compatible tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 9 and 8
• HTML5 (with fallback for IE <9) and CSS3
• responsive layout (CSS3 media queries not supported in IE 9 <)
• wordpress post format (aside, gallery, image, video, link and quote)
• Theme options, individual background, individual header image
• optional sub-
• Social Links Widget (for RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Flickr, Vimeo, LinkedIn and Delicious)
• Google web fonts (Droid Sans and Droid Serif)
• Nested comments with Gravatar images
• full width page template
• Short codes for multiple columns, info boxes in yellow, green or red and highlighted text
• translation-ready, available in English , French , Spanish , Catalan , Brazilian Portuguese , Russian , Ukrainian , Dutch and German
• meets the guidelines of the WordPress Theme Review
• License: GNU General Public License

http://www.elmastudio.de/wordpress-themes/yoko/

WhiteBoard WordPress Responsive Theme Framework

Whiteboard Framework has been helping WordPress developers cut back on their development time and improve their WordPress powered websites since 2008.

Whiteboard framework for WordPress was developed to speed up the development of WordPress themes. Whiteboard does so by eliminating the time spent on code common to all WordPress themes and includes non-intrusive code that improves the overall WordPress theme in many ways – including SEO, speed, usability, mobile support, and multi-lingual support.

Whiteboard is not like most other WordPress Frameworks out there. While most other WordPress Frameworks include a mess of styles, functions, and content areas that have to be cleaned out for nearly every project, Whiteboard remains a true WordPress Framework. Whiteboard includes only the core WordPress structure and does not get fancy with unnecessary functions. While Whiteboard does include Less Framework and a minimal theme, these can be easily removed with the exclusion of a line of HTML each.

http://whiteboardframework.com/