there are hundreds, or thousands, of great WordPress themes. i wish someone would make a "WordPress Theme to SilverStripe Template Converter" :)

is there a way to do it manually?

I'm not sure how you would go about writing a Wordpress to SilverStripe theme converter - I believe that Wordpress themes allow you do include PHP code in the theme, which would make it very difficult.

You could perhaps write a converter that recognised PHP snippets commonly used in wordpress templates. It would never be 100%, but it could probably lower the barrier to entry...

I think that the fact that wordpress themes are spread across multiple files, and not always in the same files, would make a WP to SS theme converter very difficult.

IMO, it's easier just to do it manually -> e.g, get the generated HTML output (just view source in firefox), paste it into a text editor and just replace the content and style sheets etc. with SilverStripe template tags.

Introducing some coding standards, like IDs anc Classes names for specific site sections would really simplify the conversion process ;)

Unfortunately, no one cares about this, so you can only hope that the menus will be called sth like "menu", text containers like "content" etc.

Recently, I was thinking about writing a program to convert a theme written in specific standards to SilverStripe, even done a bit of coding, but it's not ready yet so I seriously doubt that it will be useful for anybody (search forums for the Theme Maker to find it ;) )

Wojtek we have had a bit of a play around with guidelines on naming see our html, css pages and our microformats page

http://doc.silverstripe.com/doku.php?id=html - lays out the core IDs
http://doc.silverstripe.com/doku.php?id=css#ids_and_classes
http://doc.silverstripe.com/doku.php?id=microformats#using_microformats_in_silverstripe

We are still drafting and testing these ideas and would love some feedback once we have the general ideas drafted / suggestions would be great.

As far as standards go, I'd like to suggest using the wordpress 'sandbox' paradigm. The sandbox sets many CSS class attributes for the mark-up sections. It adds class attributes like 'first-post,' for the first posting on the page, and many others, including some class attributes based on date and time of day.

A user of the sandbox theme only needs to put in a CSS file with positioning and other attributes: Kind of like the Zen Garden for Wordpress.

All of my sites which use wordpress (http://celarien.com/ , http://romancecapitol.com/ , http://kegare.org ) use sandbox as a base.

Sandbox is discussed at: http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/. You can view the entrants in the design competition at http://www.sndbx.org/results/designs/