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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21931 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-30
• Released on: 2008-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author

Tessa Blakeley Silver

Tessa Blakeley Silver's background is in print design and traditional illustration. She evolved over the years into web and multi-media development, where she focuses on usability and interface design. Prior to starting her consulting and development company hyper3media (pronounced hyper-cube media) hyper3media.com, Tessa was the VP of Interactive Technologies at eHigherEducation, an online learning and technology company developing compelling multimedia simulations, interactions, and games that met online educational requirements like 508, AICC, and SCORM. She has also worked as a consultant and freelancer for J. Walter Thompson and The Diamond Trading Company (formerly known as DeBeers) and was a Design Specialist and Senior Associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers' East Region Marketing department. Tessa authors several design and web technology blogs. Joomla! Template Design is her first book.

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Customer Reviews

An Extended WordPress Theme Tutorial
WordPress Theme Design is a short book, 204 pages and offers an experience very much like that given by the Peachpit Press' Visual QuickProject Series. This is not a definitive guide to WordPress theming. Tessa Silver walks us through the creation of a WordPress theme intended for a monthly magazine site. As much CMS/beyond-the-blog flexibility of WordPress needs to be implemented by creative theming, this project offers an insight into how to customize WordPress for sites other than plain vanilla blogs. WordPress core features like "the loop," are mentioned but we are referred to the WordPress Codex documentation for more information. That's pretty much the way the book works, features or concepts, such as the loop or drop down menus are discussed, but for expanded explanations we are pointed to external web documentation.

The writing is clear and conversational and is targeted towards someone with a reasonable grounding in HTML and CSS, I'd say advanced novice to early intermediate. Those without an understanding of HTML will find it over their heads. A very basic understand of PHP syntax is also helpful. Except for WordPress specific code, experienced, standards aware coders will find much of the material pretty basic. Ms. Silver does create her design with modern web standards best practices, which she describes in a standards based context. The theme we create by following the tutorial is functional and illustrates some of WordPress' advanced capabilities, which can be accessed only through clever theming. Basic SEO is mentioned, and some advanced WordPress plug-ins and capabilities are briefly covered.

Chapter 6 offers a short overview of WordPress functions and a nice template tag reference. In Chapter 2, Silver offers brief descriptions describing her design workflow process and some of the tools she uses. In chapters 3-5 we create the basic theme and are introduced to WordPress themeing conventions. Chapters 7-9 briefly discuss some advanced WordPress capabilities, mostly gained through the use of plug-ins and widgets.

Good for beginners: Review by Tod McKenna of blog.todmeansfox.com
Well written. Good tips. Too short. Not a reference book. Hardly a "complete" guide.

I found most of the book to be fairly basic, but I am experienced in designing standards-compliant sites using the tools and technologies Tessa uses (PHP, CSS, XHTML, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc..). I suspect that others with similar backgrounds would find this book not so helpful. For those just starting with CSS and XHTML, this book would be a good starting point though. It is filled with good advice (the best advice is to use standards-based approaches and to separate content from design) and lots of tips ranging from SEO to Photoshop techniques.

With Tessa's conversational writing approach, you feel that she's your tutor who genuinely wants you to create great, standards-compliant WordPress themes. She talks with you and not at you making the book easy to read and understand. Some key highlights include:

1. Rapid Design Comping - which is a design process coined by Tessa that takes you through ten steps of the design process from sketching to production.

2. Great section on font choices and why you might use one font over another.

3. A good discussion on validating pages through the W3C's XHTML and CSS validation services.

4. A good introduction on WordPress' template hierarchy. This is very important to understand when developing WP themes. I would have liked an entire chapter on this, though.

One thing I found totally absent (aside from a quick mention in a sidebar note) is a discussion and walkthrough of WordPress' OOP design. Just as it is important as a WP theme developer to understand the template system, good CSS, and XHTML, it is equally important to understand WP's object oriented design. An entire chapter, early on in the book, could have been written to discuss this. Tessa would have made it simple and easy to understand, I am sure.

I would have liked a better reference section. With a better reference section, I would be more apt to keep the book on my desk. As it is now, it will likely sit on the shelf never to be read again!

Tessa creates a single theme in the book (an Open Source Magazine), and although most of the techniques apply across many different types of themes, having a few counter examples would get you started more quickly.

One key point not stressed enough in her text is the notion of reusability. The WordPress architecture makes it highly reusable (not just flexible) so that you can call a single function under different circumstances to bring back data for different contexts. This is a powerful design feature (well known to those object-oriented developer types) that can save you time and effort, while delivering consistent and predictable results. As I have used WordPress now on several of my sites, I find this to be one of its strongest assets. When developing new themes, I feel that this point should be made crystal clear.

Additionally, I think that a better discussion on some of WP's core functions, and perhaps how they can and should be implemented, should have been included.

All said, this is pretty good starter book. As an experienced developer (not a WP theme developer though), I didn't get much out of it.

Great for Aspiring WordPress Designers
This is a rock solid book with great, practical advice on how to create a WordPress theme. The style is very relaxed and conversational yet to the point. I felt like the author just came by and hung out with me at my pc, teaching me how to create a WordPress theme. I've been using WordPress for years, but never had the time or discipline to track down all I would need to know to do this.

The pictures and examples are great, all the code can be downloaded from the book's web site. I learned a lot not just about designing a theme for WordPress, but also gained some great tips on working with XHTML, CSS and how to troubleshoot both as well as Java Script.

I'd say a reader wants to have some familiarity with editing text files, sending them to a server and html. I thought the book did a great job of explaining anything else that would be needed. And I mention sending files to a server - but instructions are given for installing a local setup for testing. One could learn what this book has to offer without actually sending files out to a remote host.

Just a great book that I found to be extremely helpful to someone with no web design background, but I want my blogs to be more unique.