WordPress Theme Design

by Tessa Blakeley Silver

This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up your WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up your theme's template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add your own custom 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 effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling you to have full control over your site's design and branding.

Genres: Website Design, Education, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book does a decent job teaching WordPress theme design. It walks you through wireframing, writing the HTML and CSS, and creating graphics, then building a WordPress theme from those pieces.

It’s mostly WordPress-specific, addressing the WordPress Loop, template files, template tags, widgets, and plugins. However, many other general web design topics are included, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

It was published May 2008, so it’s written for WordPress 2.5, and some of the info is outdated. Understandably, many other references to “current” web design technology and trends are dated. There are several hacks for dealing with Internet Explorer 6, which are fortunately not as necessary with more standards-compliant versions of Internet Explorer 8 and 9. However, most of the examples and concepts are still valuable.

Notes

Design tips for WordPress
1. Create and keep lists: checklists, color lists, font lists, image treatment lists, etc.
2. Design for Firefox first, then fix for Internet Explorer.
3. Validate your HTML and CSS often.
• validate each chunk of code as you complete it
• visually check in several browsers
• use W3C validators to validate: W3C Markup Validation and W3C CSS Validation
• use Firefox’s Error Console to debug and validate JavaScript
4. Consider usability. It naturally lends itself to great design.

If necessary, assign multiple classes to a single HTML element for more flexible CSS targeting.

Use PHP include calls to modularize your theme. Put code to be reused into a new PHP file, then call it with <?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/page.php'); ?>

Use All in One SEO Pack plugin to generate metatags

Recommended web design websites
A List Apart
Smashing Magazine

[Claire Ragin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the online Wordpress documentation to be overwhelming to a beginner, so I got this book as a jumpstart. It helped me get started; as I went along I found I relied on it less and less, and relied more on the online docs. It was a good intro and helped me get going more quickly than if I tried to do it all with the official documentation.

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Laughably, ridiculously useless. Way too short, way too sparse, almost no workable examples, way too many typos. This was obviously thrown together at the last minute by a desperate author/publishing team.

[Lilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

review forthcoming!

[Jay Cruz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally done with this one. I'm sure this is one I'll be coming back to again. It's good, but it's a little above my level of knowledge of web design.

[Ricardo Robles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up until now, and even if I'm just fast reading it, seems very good and promising.