If you aren’t already following along, I highly recommend checking out the How To Create A WordPress Theme tutorial series by Ian Stewart (ThemeShaper.com). This 12-part series (8 complete at the time of this writing) aims to take you from nothing to a fully functional, semantically rich, flexible WordPress theme in digestible chunks. Along the way, Ian describes the changes being made, and why you are making them. In this way, you can gain a basic understanding of the roles of the various theme template files, and the code contained within them.
The lesson is broken down thusly:
- Introduction
- Theme Development Tools
- Creating a Theme HTML Structure
- Template and Directory Structure
- The Header Template
- The Index Template
- The Single Post, Post Attachment, & 404 Templates
- The Comments Template
- The Search Template & The Page Template
- The Archive, Author, Category & Tags Template
- The Sidebar Template
- Reset-Rebuild Theme CSS & Define Your Layouts
If you’ve ever thought about creating your own theme, but felt like the task was too big to tackle, this series of articles is for you. It’s a great bit of instruction that will introduce you to the core pieces of WordPress theming without overwhelming you or trying to cram too much into a single article.
Props, Ian!
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5 Comments
Ian is a genius. He needs to get a publisher and write a book. If you compare his articles to all the other WordPress ‘this and that’ books on theme development, his posts are better written and more informative hands down. Rock on theme developer. Rock on.
I’ve got good mileage out of some of Ian’s articles before so I’ll definitely be giving this series a look. I may wait until the entire series is published before diving in though as I’m a bit of an ‘all in one go’ kinda guy and would no doubt get frustrated whilst waiting on the latest part.
Wow..I would love to be able to create my own website. These tutorials seem simple enough. I have 2 blogs and would love to be able to do wordpress.org instead of wordpress.com…Being a newbie, I have learned very quickly you are limited with what you can do with .com. Great site and info.
There is a new program that allows you to create and download WP themes directly from Photoshop (Divine plug-in). It will be interesting to both beginner and advanced WP users.
Thanks for the post.. I actually have been doing Madison Web Design for awhile and I am just now getting into doing blogs and doing templates I have much to learn yet. Thanks again for this info!
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[...] three choices for my starting point: Carrington, Thematic, or a semi-from-scratch theme based on Ian Stewart’s recent theme tutorial. My current leaning is towards building a Thematic child theme. I like the ideas in Carrington a [...]
[...] three choices for my starting point: Carrington, Thematic, or a semi-from-scratch theme based on Ian Stewart’s recent theme tutorial. My current leaning is towards building a Thematic child theme. I like the ideas in Carrington a [...]