Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Book Image

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in WordPress. Using custom themes you can brand your site for a particular corporate image, ensure standards compliance, and create easily navigable layouts. But most WordPress users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward. It's easy to create powerful and professional themes for your WordPress web site when you've got this book to hand. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions to create a robust and flexible WordPress theme, along with best practices for theme development. It will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It reviews the best practices 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. 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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
WordPress 2.8 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Creating your WordPress workflow


Your work flow will pretty much look like the following:

You'll be editing CSS and XHTML in your HTML editor. After each edit, you'll hit Save, then use Alt + Tab or the taskbar to switch over to your browser window. You'll then hit Refresh and check the results (I'll normally recommend using Alt + Tab to switch over to the directed window, but you can use your own way). Depending on where you are in this process, you might also have two or more browser windows or tabs open—one with your WordPress theme view and others with the key WordPress Administration panels that you'll be using.

Whether you're using Dreamweaver, or a robust text editor such as Coda, TextWrangler, or HTML-Kit, all of these let you FTP directly via a site panel and/or set up a working directory panel (if you're working locally on your own server). Be sure to use this built-in FTP feature. It will let you edit and save to the actual theme template files and stylesheet without having to stop...