Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in WordPress. Using custom themes you can brand your site for a particular corporate image, ensure standards compliance, and create easily navigable layouts. But most WordPress users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward.
It’s easy to create powerful and professional themes for your WordPress web site when you’ve got this book to hand. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions to create a robust and flexible WordPress theme, along with best practices for theme development. It will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It reviews the best practices 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. 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 the 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 plugins and widgetize your theme
- Improve post and page content using jQuery
- Enhance the interactivity of your themes using Flash
- Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.8 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 find 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.
Book Details
- Paperback: 292 pages
- Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 30, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1849510083
- ISBN-13: 978-1849510080
- File Size: 12.0 MiB
- Hits: 2,480 times
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