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Product Description
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.
Average Ratings : 3.5
Price : $28.00
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I was really hoping that this book would teach something that is incredibly complicated, I was, yet again, disappointed.
The book seemingly starts out simple enough. However, on page 31, is where it begins to get muddy and gets worse from here. It begins by talking about typeography and on page 33 shows an image of something that is nowhere explained as to how it came into existance. At no time that I can see that this term is explained and how that image on page 33 was created.
Upon further reading, it is easy to see that the authors are under the impression that beginners know where to start.
I’ll stick with the arduous task of trying to muddle through backward engineering current themes.
When are these people going to understand that many of us trying to learn this stuff need to have simple, step by step instructions?
Sorry, thumbs down on this one.
Rating: 2 / 5
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This book is full of mistakes, typos, missing html code vs. the files you can download on line.
The author also has an “innovative” way of designing between Photoshop and the text editor, she calls “rapid design comping” which I believe is a really stupid idea. I hope no “newbie” adopts it.
I never write any negative review but this book is just terrible.
Rating: 1 / 5
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I purchased this book hoping for detailed information and just didn’t find it. If you want to build a WordPress site very similar to what the author describes, this is a great book!
If you want to use different headers for each page, or change aspects of how the pages display data, or create password areas, or do ANYTHING else that differs from the author’s layout-good luck! As nothing is really explained with any clarity, editing is impossible to do without endless trial and error.
I finally had to resort to purchasing another book, and was pleasantly surprised by the content of WordPress for Dummies.
Rating: 1 / 5
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I find this book a bit boasting of what the author did, not really helpful in designing my own theme. I was expecting more how to and less “look at what I did”. The “follow along” instructions were a tutorial on how to design a website. I already know how to do that, I wanted something on the css and php of the WordPress application, without having to read the learn to be a website designer.
Rating: 3 / 5
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WordPress is one of (it not the) most popular blogging tools (or simple CMS) on the web today. It is easily expandable to accommodate most sites that need to be updated on a regular basis and requires minimal programming (PHP) skills. If you are a designer, it allows you to create a custom design (called a ¡§theme¡¨) using regular HTML, CSS and images to make your WordPress site look just the way you want to.
Of course there are some things you need to know on creating a WordPress theme. You could search the internet for resources on how to create your own themes on various websites, but that would take many hours and you probably would be misinformed about a few things and that would set you back awhile. Instead of wasting your time with all that, just get this book. It¡¦s a no brainer. º
This book written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, is the first book to help web designers and developers understand how to create a WordPress theme from start to finish. I have never seen a book about WordPress that covers a topic so completely. This book is definitely a book you should buy if you want to take your basic WP skills to the next level in learning more about WP in general as well as understanding how themes work and how to create them and modify existing ones.
This book has a little bit of everything¡K.From explaining the basics of WP, to the basics concepts of design, to explaining some example web site designs and how they work. Tessa goes to work (chapter 3) and explains the sections of a WP theme like the index.php, sidebar.php, header.php and footer.php. Of course the basics begin with talking about ¡§the loop¡¨ which displays all your posts in order and lets you display all your display properties of the main page. The second most important and fun part of your page is normally your sidebar.php page which you can include you main navigation, categories, search, display tagging, widgets, and other cool stuff. It is all explained in great detail with nothing left out.
I have been using WP for a while now and my site (http://www.javascriptworkshop.com) which uses WordPress is a simple design, but I cannot tell you how many hours I spent trying to figure out something that after reading this book would have helped me instantly. I wish this book came out a year ago. º
The rest of the book (chapter 5 ¡V
go through creating a theme from scratch as well as troubleshooting it. I love chapter 6 and its syntax reference in reviewing very common and not so common template tags. These are predefined PHP functions that allow you to pull information from the MySQL database that every WP installation uses. Every new version of WP, changes a few of these and this book has the most up-to-date information on it. You can also go to ¡§codex¡¨ section of the WordPress.org site (http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page) to get all the information you need as well. But it will take a lot longer than using this wonderful book.
Another great chapter is chapter 8 which shows you how to add some interactive Ajax forms and content on your WP site. Ajax is something that allows you to pull information from a database (MySQL in this case) without having to refresh the page. It looks cool and if done properly can really make you site standout from the rest.
The final chapter (chapter 9) gives you some great design tips that would take hours to figure out on your own. A great extra bonus chapter.
If you are using WordPress at any level, then I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5
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