[JoelSutherland]

My company hates WordPress style theming. In fact, many of the design decisions we made on our product were to address this pain point. There are so many details to remember that the process of creating a theme becomes about Wordpress rather than about front-end web code.

We use Twig as a templating language and expose our entire data API so there isn't a massive set of functions to learn. Here is an example of how to list the latest posts:

  <ul>
    {% for post in hifi.get({'type':'post','orderBy':'-publishedAt'}) %}
    <li>{{ post.title }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>

This keeps the process of creating a theme mostly about HTML/CSS because it dramatically reduces the specific information that you need to know about the platform itself.