WordPress Theme Design: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

In Detail

This title will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom WordPress theme. From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live it reviews the best practices. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins.

Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.

What you will learn from this book?

• Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design
• Create detailed designs and code them up
• Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics
• Debug and validate your theme using W3C's XHTML and CSS validation tools
• Customize and tweak your theme's layout
• Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms
• Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme
• Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox
• Add interactivity to your themes using Flash
• Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0's template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions

Approach

Theme design can be approached from two angles. The first is simplicity; sometimes it suits the client and/or the site to go as bare-bones as possible. In that case, it's quick and easy to take a very basic, pre-made theme and modify it.

The second is "Unique and Beautiful". Occasionally, the site's theme needs to be created from scratch so that everything displayed caters to the specific kind of content the site offers. This book is going to take you through the Unique and Beautiful route with the idea that once you know how to create a theme from scratch, you'll be more apt at understanding what to look for in other WordPress themes.

Who this book is written for?

This book can be used by WordPress users or visual designers (with no server-side scripting or programming experience) who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors.

Regardless of your web development skill-set or level, you'll be walked through the clear, step-by-step instructions, but familiarity with a broad range of web development skills and WordPress know-how will allow you to gain maximum benefit from this book.