5 WordPress Theme Development Resources
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I have finally decided its definitely time for me to learn how to develop Wordpress themes. I’m too cheap to pay someone else to develop a theme when there are so many free ones around the net. In No Nonsense terms it really does not matter what a blog looks like anyway. The most important thing is the content and I still believe that, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I want something unique on this blog. Plus there is also the benefit that if I learn how to create Wordpress themes and maybe even a few plugins then that could create a great resource for this blog’s readers as I could offer some themes and plugins up for download. I never really took the time to learn PHP, but that will be coming soon. I don’t see it as much of a problem. After all I do have a programming degree, my only real obstacle is that I’m graphically challenged. I know what looks good once its created, but envisioning it from scratch is sometimes difficult
I decided I’ll let you guys learn along with me if you so desire. I’ve found a few resources that will help me with this task so I’ll share them here.
Wordpress Reference Guide. This is a little basic but provides several of the needed tags in a quick and dirty fashion.
Advanced Wordpress Guide This is an extension of the above guide and I’m sure it will come in handy as I advance.
Creating Widget Aware themes is one of the reasons I want to start developing my own themes. A lot of the free themes only include a minimum number of Sidebar Widgets in the themes. This means if you want to add some content to the footer or after a post you are stuck modifying the theme code. This is not very user friendly so my themes will have Widgets in all the right places. This little short blog post is a great resource.
Tagstention is one of two Dreamweaver Extensions I have located to help me in the process of developing Wordpress themes. I’ve only played around with it a little bit, but can already tell its going to make life a lot easier.
Another Extension is Dreamweaver Template Builder it does basically the same thing as TagStention. I installed them both in my copy of Dreamweaver and I’ll decide later which I like better.
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Comments
I am always willing to help even if I am a newbie,
Not sure if you have stopped by my site, but the theme I have now is custom designed by me, I did it in time for the new year.
To my knowledge it works quite well across all browsers (Tested in IE6, IE7, SAFARI, FIREFOX, OPERA, NETSCAPE AND FLOCK). It is also XHTML and CSS valid. I hear valid markup makes life easier for Google and other search engines.
If I am only 15 and I can design a theme you should have no problem whatsoever! All the best for the year ahead and the theme design.
I must admit that I am a bit of a WP Cowboy because I used a couple of PHP strings (hooks?) from my previous theme as I do not know the programming language…yet.
See you soon,
Once again, good luck!
Fabien
Small Fish Big Money
Get the firebug plugin for firefox. It allows you to dynamicly edit CSS on any site. So you can go to the wordpress theme repository, and see what a theme would look like if you changed certain colors.
Creating your own theme is great fun if you enjoy web design. The hardest part of it for me was all the cross-browser/platform compatability stuff. That’s a pain in the proverbials.
There are some good coding articles over at http://www.darrenhoyt.com/