Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781847193094
ISBN: 1847193099
Label: Packt Publishing
Manufacturer: Packt Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: May 30, 2008
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Release Date: May 30, 2008
Studio: Packt Publishing
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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 Rating: 
Rating:  -
This book was a great resource in creating my custom wordpress theme. You will need to have some experience with xhtml/css/php in order to work with wordpress in general (at least to customize it), so this book it not truly for beginners. If you are a beginner you will be able to work through it, but it may be frustrating if you aren't comfortable with basic coding as described above.
The author is conversational and light in style and the book is a very quick read. I was able to easily convert my .psd to a wordpress template using this book in only a few days. I did still need to go to the codex to look up some thing in more detail, but this book was invaluable in helping me get grounded on the concepts needed to start developing wordpress themes.
Rating: -
If you are looking for a Content Publishing System that is fast, simple, and flexible then you'll want to consider using WordPress. Some of the advantages of WordPress are that it's easy to expand and it can accommodate just about any kind of site design with minimal programming skills.
Speaking of site design, if you're planning on creating a unique look and feel for your WordPress driving site then you'll need this book, WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver. Tessa does an excellent job of explaining in detail how to create a WordPress theme from start to finish -- the author even walks you through an example theme design "step-by-step."
Not only will this book teach you the basics of the famous "WordPress loop" but how its framework is arranged and how it's used by the application. Furthermore, you'll understanding how themes are integrated into this framework and how to create them or modify existing ones to take advantage of WordPress' full capabilities. ... Read More
Rating:  -
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:  -
I became interested in WordPress theming by coincidence; I bought a couple of general WordPress books and at the same time purchased a DVD on theming (by Aleks Monahan) that caught my attention. The DVD got me really interested in the subject and I bought this book later hoping that it would be one level "up" from the DVD.
Well, I was mistaken. This book hasn't advanced my knowledge and the amount of chatter and fluff in it is very careless. It makes it hard to keep on it and finish it. This book starts from the same starting point as the DVD I had already watched, just takes a lot longer to get to the same points.
This book is 240 pages, so it's a small book to begin with and images take up a huge part of it. But when you take into account all the filler and nonsense used to fill up this book, you realize this isn't more than an average tutorial that they desperately wanted to turn into a book by adding lots of waffle... but it's at the expense of my time being wasted. ... Read More
Rating: -
I found this book to be very informative and easy to follow. I did follow the previous reviewers advice and coupled it with How to Theme Wordpress-from Blank to Beautiful in 2 hours(DVD). Both work great hand in hand. I haven't had any problems.
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