A Beginner's Guide to Titan Framework: Introduction

All top-notch web developers who are keen observers must have witnessed WordPress grow from a basic blogging forum to a fully-fledged development platform. Powering millions of websites today, WordPress has now been acknowledged as a globally accepted go-to CMS for web development.

Initially, there was an impression that this CMS was aimed exclusively at code nerds who were well versed with their coding skills. But later, the WordPress community started to put more emphasis on the development of frameworks which not only have enhanced the flexibility of WordPress but have also made the coding process simpler and less time-consuming.

These frameworks started to bring some mind-boggling results, as now developers could greatly save their production time, and the development projects were reasonably paced. Well, if you asked me then, I initially was not a pro-framework person. But I was sold when I experienced that writing only a few lines of code could bring such extensive results.

Considering this fact, I recently explored a framework, for one of my projects, which is calledTitan Framework. I really liked how it works and the flexibility it offers by still staying minimal. I plan to write a series of articles about Titan Framework.In this series we will explore Titan Framework in detail, how it works and what features or options it offers. So, let's get started with a quick introduction of Titan Framework. This is what I'll be calling it for now.

Titan Framework

Titan Framework is a WordPress options framework which makes it possible to develop flexible plugins and themes by adding options to them. Though it is only a year old, Titan Framework claims to be one of the easiest options framework in the WordPress community. The reason is its ability to create configurable settings which can be included in your development project by adding only a few lines of code. Isn't it great? Let's find out.

Benjamin Intal (@bfintal) is the man behind this intuitive piece of software. With about 20 options, all of which are customizable, you create admin pages, tabs, options, meta boxes, theme customizer sections and panels pretty easily.

Titan Framework has also made one other contribution, i.e. it has unified the WordPress Settings API, Metaboxes and theme customizer sections/panels. The set of options you get with Titan Framework are the same whether you want to create an admin panel or a metabox, or even if you are creating Theme Customizer sections.

Working With Titan Framework

When it comes to Titan Framework, it is all about following three simple steps with which you can add flexibility to your WordPress themes or plugins:

1. Set up your project.
2. Create options.
3. Get values.

Let's see what can be created by using Titan Framework.You can create different containers like:

• Admin panels
• Tabs inside admin panels
• Meta boxes with options in theme for any post type
• Theme customizer sections and panels with options in them, some of which support the Live Preview

Talking about the set of options we have in Titan Framework, within almost all of the above containers you can add multiple options, e.g.:

• Checkbox
• Color picker
• Date
• Enable
• Font Style
• Heading
• Media uploader
• Number
• Radio buttons
• Radio image
• Save and reset buttons
• Select (drop down)
• Select categories and taxonomies
• Select pages and posts
• Textarea
• and many more

Features of Titan Framework

Before I conclude today's article, let's look at some of the features of Titan Framework.

Free & Open Source

Titan Framework is 100% free to use and is open source. It is available on GitHub.You can use the framework in your personal and commercial WordPress projects without any restriction.

Multiple Options

Titan Framework comes with a range of 20+ options which are quite versatile in their functionality. These options range from the simpler ones like text fields to more complex ones like multicheck posts, categories, pages, etc.

Customizer Settings

Gone are the days when you had to worry about creating your own settings from scratch. Titan Framework alone can bear all the tedious development tasks, while you can spend more time on actually building a great product.

Auto-Generated CSS

Thinking about the options will quickly draw your attention to their styling, which seems to be quite daunting. No worries! Titan Framework automatically generates CSS for all the options which you create. It also supportsSCSS.

Conclusion

After working with it for more than one project, I can assure you Titan is one of the finest options frameworks among all of its competitors. However, what I feel it lacks is the number of options being offered currently. I'm sure Benjamin and his team will be working on this, and we will soon be seeing some more additions to the list of options.

In the next article, I will discuss the basic installation and configuration of Titan Framework with your project. Let me know what you think in the comments belowor reach out to me atTwitter.