When building websites in WordPress, we don’t like to compromise on the design of the HTML & CSS prototypes we hand crafted during the website design phase of our client meetings. Transitioning these hand crafted website prototypes to a functioning WordPress installation always required an in depth understanding of the WordPress template hierarchy which was often was out of reach for your typical front end designer.

Additionally we often like to leverage the power of custom meta boxes to make future edits to the content as smooth as possible for the client. This however further complicated the hand off between the front end designer and the developer and often when the developer went to make the content editable, the design was compromised.

We’ve always liked how Perch, a competitor to WordPress, has handled this problem – which is to simply take your static HTML & CSS prototype and identity sections of it that you wanted to mark as editable for the client. We wondered if it would be possible to build something like Perch as a theme framework for WordPress.

Burly is the theme framework for WordPress we created to address this problem. With Burly, if you know HTML & CSS you can make a custom WordPress theme with minimal changes to your HTML. Simply replace the sections of your HTML that you want to make editable with Burly tags and boom – you’re up and running.

We are still working out some of the finer details of Burly, but we’d appreciate any feedback and would love it if you gave it a try.