WordPress Themes

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes

Wicked WordPress Themes is a step-by-step guide to creating beautiful themes for the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress.

By following the book’s advice, readers can produce designs that are aesthetically stunning, consistent, and for-purpose -whether it’s for their own use, or to drive a high price on the theme marketplace.

All facets of theme design are covered: from design, coding, and deployment, to ensuring readers’ designs are ready-to-go as soon as they’re installed.

Wicked WordPress Themes teaches readers how to leverage theme design frameworks to dramatically shorten development time, enabling them to enter the theme market faster.

Rating: (out of 9 reviews)

List Price: $ 39.95
Price: $ 24.83

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes Reviews

Review by Jason E. Rice:

I received the book Friday afternoon (8/20/2010) and finished reading it Sunday (8/22/2010), and my head is still spinning … but in a good way. I am about three weeks new to WordPress, and I have to say that it’s overwhelming trying to learn about everything that makes it what it is. I had been reading through the codex ([...]), which is a tremendous resource by the WordPress folks, but it has been difficult for me to tie it all together. This book is a great primer to theme building with WordPress and will help you to understand the main components that make up the WordPress software, and it does so in a pleasant and organized way. I dabble in web design, but my profession is that of web development and programming, and I’m pleased to say that this book, while aimed at web designers, will encourage the curiosity of developers alike.

I had some reservations about the book having four authors, as the flow of a tech book doesn’t always work when there are too many “experts” coming to the table. I’m pleased to say that the book flows quite well, and the language and format with which the authors use to explain theme building is mostly consistent and cohesive. The only problem I had was in chapter 7: Theme Options, as it felt like the author of this chapter was jumping around a bit and not quite as organized and detailed with some of the explanations, and perhaps rushing a bit. Otherwise, I now feel much more confident in WordPress and theme building from not only a 10,000 foot view, but a 1,000 foot view as well. As with anything tech, you have to “pop the hood”, and get your hands dirty, and I now feel like I can thanks to this book.

The book is broken into 8 chapters … interestingly, each chapter fundamentally builds upon the last, but you could easily make a quick pass through the book to get familiarized with WordPress and themes, and then use it as a high-level reference thereafter (and using the codex will probably make much more sense after moving through this book). The chapters are:

1. Introducing WordPress

2. Planning Your Theme

3. Theme Design 101

4. Theme Frameworks

5. Advanced Theme Construction

6. Widgets

7. Theme Options

8. Selling Your Theme

I bought this book with two ideas in mind: learn about the “guts” of WordPress from a high level, and understand what goes into a WordPress theme to eventually make and sell them, and the book moves you forward in the right direction. This book, IMO, does a very good job of covering a great deal of ground in a short amount of time. I have only started to work on converting my business website to WordPress, but this book, and the information in it, has given me the confidence to play and experiment, and really go after the inner workings of the Thematic framework.

Thanks to SitePoint for a great book on the topic!

Review by riddix:

I read my decent share of WordPress books so far, probably a dozen of them. So far this is one of the better ones, maybe the best, at least for me. Personally I am a designer with some basic coding skills in PHP. Setting up scripts from scratch is something I am not too good at, but I can understand scripts by reading them and tweaking them to my needs. This book helped me to understand PHP a little more and especially the ins and outs of WordPress.

This book is probably not the best book to read in order to get rolling with your theme development, it is a bit too advanced for that. But after one or two other books serving you the typical spoon-fed chunks of what WordPress is and how to install it, this book is great. It introduces you to the concept of frameworks, child-themes and action-hooks and filters. This might scare a lot of people away, but once you get the hang of it you will love the concept. If you are serious about developing professional themes you have to read this book.

There is an ebook version available as well.

Buy Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes now for only $ 24.83!

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog (Smashing Magazine Book Series)

GO BEYOND THE BLOG Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility. Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more. YOU WILL LEARN: THE ANATOMY OF A WP INSTALL AND HOW WORDPRESS ACTUALLY WORKS HOW TO BUILD BEAUTIFUL WORDPRESS THEMES – INCLUDING CHILD THEMES HOW TO CREATE CUSTOM LOGIN FORMS AND ADMIN THEMES HOW TO USE THE LOOP TO CONTROL CONTENT, AND EVEN USE ALTERNATIVES TO THE LOOP HOW TO INTEGRATE THEME OPTIONS HOW TO BUILD PLUGINS – INCLUDING WIDGET FUNCTIONALITY HOW TO BUILD YOUR WORDPRESS PROJECTS FOR SEO INTEGRATE WORDPRESS WITH THE SOCIAL WEB HOW TO CREATE AMAZING NAVIGATION HOW TO USE CONDITIONAL CONTROL ELEMENTS

• ISBN13: 9780470684153
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Rating: (out of 15 reviews)

List Price: $ 44.99
Price: $ 22.89

WordPress Theme Design: A complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes

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 designCreate detailed designs and code them up Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphicsDebug and validate your theme using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation toolsCustomize and tweak your theme’s layoutSet up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive formsDownload and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your themeImprove 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

Rating: (out of 33 reviews)

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Professional WordPress (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

An in-depth look at the internals of the WordPress system. As the most popular blogging and content management platform available today, WordPress is a powerful tool. This exciting book goes beyond the basics and delves into the heart of the WordPress system, offering overviews of the functional aspects of WordPress as well as plug-in and theme development. What is covered in this book? WordPress as a Content Management System Hosting Options Installing WordPress Files Database Configuration Dashboard Widgets Customizing the Dashboard Creating and Managing Content Categorizing Your Content Working with Media Comments and Discussion Working with Users Managing, Adding, Upgrading, and Using the Theme Editor Working with Widgets Adding and Managing New Plugins Configuring WordPress Exploring the Code Configuring Key Files wp-config.php file Advanced wp-config Options What’s in the Core? WordPress Codex and Resources Understanding and customizing the Loop Building A Custom Query Complex Database Operations Dealing With Errors Direct Database Manipulation

• ISBN13: 9780470560549
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Rating: (out of 17 reviews)

List Price: $ 44.99
Price: $ 25.92

Professional WordPress (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Reviews

Review by Michael S. Ball:

I just got the book this morning, and I’m halfway through it. It’s exactly what I needed, a guided tour that cuts through the mass of undigested information that is [...]. This is the Baedeker’s guide for the blog maintainer. I like WordPress, really I do, but how do I find the proper plugin to solve my problem? There are almost nine thousand of them! Knowing the vocabulary and how the system works makes it much easier to sort through them. After reading this, I can probably even use the WordPress Codex without spending a week sorting out what goes where.

What I like best is that it’s written for a programmer, without all the gushing about how great a system it is. The facts, with just enough evaluation to say what’s important.

Way to go, guys!

Review by M. Erb:

“Professional WordPress – Design and Development” is a superb book that will be appreciated greatly by developers looking to WordPress (WP) for the first time or for giving them a more thorough understanding of the inner-workings of WP. WordPress, as I write this, is at the WordPress 3.0 beta 2 cycle of development. This book will still be pertinent even though it was not specifically written as a WP v3.0 book.

The book’s chapters are arranged in 3 major sections. Chapters 1 thru 4 are a top-level look at WordPress. The history and development of WordPress is discussed as well as the presentation of a functional overview, discussion of installation (including a valuable discussion of debugging errors you may have during installation), a code overview and a tour of the core. There is good stuff here. For instance if you are unclear of the distinction between tags and categories, this will clear things up for you. Or if you’ve ever wondered what the Turbo option in the Dashboard is, your answer will be found in these chapters. There is even an excellent discussion of advanced wp-config options that is sure to be helpful to the developer as well as a lot of information on configuring your .htaccess file.

Chapters 5 thru 8 thoroughly explore the Loop, understanding the WordPress database and how to directly manipulate it (database queries, building your own taxonomies, direct database manipulation), plugins development & WordPress integration (shortcodes, widgets, plugin security) and theme development (modifying existing themes, creating new themes.)

Chapters 9 thru 15 cover everything else including content aggregation (how to get information into your WordPress site by various means such as XML feeds, integrating twitter, RSS feeds), creating a user experience through consistent navigation, design elements, how to structure your information, searching your site, mobile access & statistics, cache performance, dealing with spam, using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). For developers considering a new web site with WordPress, migrating an existing site to WP is an important consideration and this is discussed in Chapter 14. Chapter 15 concludes the book with a discussion on the WordPress developer community; how you can contribute, working on the core using Subversion and a look at other WordPress resources.

I am not a hardcore developer by any means. My experience with PHP and CSS is marginal, yet I learned a lot from reading this book. Using the code samples helped further my understanding of PHP and this has given me a new interest in learning more about the “inside” of WordPress.

This is a substantial book on WordPress especially geared to developers and secondarily to enthusiasts who wish to dig into WordPress more deeply and begin to explore what makes WordPress tick and how to extend WordPress. Even though the topics are discussed at an advanced level, the writing is not nearly as dry and cumbersome as other technical books can be.

This is an extremely valuable resource for the developer yet there is a thorough approach taken in the early chapters that even a fledgling WP user would find valuable (but not a non-technically minded reader.) However, it is certainly not an appropriate “first” book for the non-technical person simply desiring to get started with WordPress. There are more appropriate books for the non-technical reader. Having said that, there are certain users who may be inspired enough by the easily readable approach taken by the authors to be propelled to learn more because of the depth of information that is contained in this book. Merely using some of the existing code samples can help you learn more about writing and debugging PHP code and serve as a platform for future growth in your knowledge and skills.

This is a stand-out book on WordPress and anyone doing serious development with WordPress could benefit from “Professional WordPress.” Highly recommended.

Buy Professional WordPress (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) now for only $ 25.92!

WordPress 2.8 Theme Design

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. 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 find 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.

Rating: (out of 7 reviews)

List Price: $ 39.99
Price: $ 28.00

Head First WordPress: A Brain-Friendly Guide to Creating Your Own Custom WordPress Blog

Whether you’re promoting your business or writing about your travel adventures, Head First WordPress will teach you not only how to make your blog look unique and attention-grabbing, but also how to dig into the more complex features of WordPress 3.0 to make your website work well, too. You’ll learn how to move beyond the standard WordPress look and feel by customizing your blog with your own URL, templates, plugin functionality, and more. As you learn, you’ll be working with real WordPress files: The book’s website provides pre-fab WordPress themes to download and work with as you follow along with the text. Gain immediate experience with WordPress 3.0, the June 2010 release of the software Get your site up and running by setting up a MySQL database and creating configuration files Work with the WordPress platform to create posts and pages, learn the difference between tags and categories, edit content, moderate comments, and manage spam Explore how to extend WordPress with plugins and templates Convert custom designs (in HTML and CSS) into functional themes and use them in WordPress We think your time is too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First WordPress uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

• ISBN13: 9780596806286
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Rating: (out of 4 reviews)

List Price: $ 34.99
Price: $ 18.93

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

GO BEYOND THE BLOG Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility. Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more. YOU WILL LEARN: THE ANATOMY OF A WP INSTALL AND HOW WORDPRESS ACTUALLY WORKS HOW TO BUILD BEAUTIFUL WORDPRESS THEMES – INCLUDING CHILD THEMES HOW TO CREATE CUSTOM LOGIN FORMS AND ADMIN THEMES HOW TO USE THE LOOP TO CONTROL CONTENT, AND EVEN USE ALTERNATIVES TO THE LOOP HOW TO INTEGRATE THEME OPTIONS HOW TO BUILD PLUGINS – INCLUDING WIDGET FUNCTIONALITY HOW TO BUILD YOUR WORDPRESS PROJECTS FOR SEO INTEGRATE WORDPRESS WITH THE SOCIAL WEB HOW TO CREATE AMAZING NAVIGATION HOW TO USE CONDITIONAL CONTROL ELEMENTS

Rating: (out of 15 reviews)

List Price: $ 44.99
Price:

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog Reviews

Review by D. Day:

Let me preface this review by saying this is NOT a beginner WordPress book. That said, the folks who leave a mediocre review for this book due to this being over their head are ridiculous. If your looking for a book that teaches you “how to get started” with wordpress this is not your book. You will NOT find sections on how to create a post, add tags, install plugins, etcetera. This book is to teach you how to do advanced secure installs, understand the wordpress framework, template tags (the code snippets that make things work), how to create themes and plugins, and start working with some examples.

This book was an amazing for me because of where I am at in my wordpress development. Before reading this book I knew how to install wordpress, set up permalinks, work with .htaccess files, create posts, add plugins, and even do some minor tweaking. I did not however understand the core code concepts of wordpress that make it work, thus I could not advance beyond an “advanced beginner.” When I would go to read advanced wordpress books they were all written in techie speak and I always ended up feeling lost.

Enter Smashing WordPress:

From the moment I started reading this book it was right at the level I needed. I had finished my knowledge of the beginner to mid level stages of wordpress and Smashing WordPress took me to a solid level of advanced wordpress techniques and theme/plugin building. It is written in PLAIN ENGLISH and not techie speak like most advanced technology books (please remember you must have a solid beginner level understanding or this book will seem complicated).

If your looking to start understanding all that code that makes themes and plugins work and you have a solid understanding of the basics of wordpress this book is for you.

From the very first chapter this book I stated to absorb the wordpress code concepts and advanced techniques I was craving to learn. I am half way through this book and I am quickly becoming the advanced wordpress theme creator that I have been wanting to be. (This book will also give you a solid ability to modify even the most advanced themes)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO WORDPRESS USERS READY TO UNDERSTAND AND BUILD OR MODIFY WORDPRESS THEME AND PLUGINS.

Review by Mark Luetke:

I am fairly new to web design and wordpress theme development and have been searching for ways to go beyond the typical wordpress theme. This book gives you exactly what it says it will. It really does go beyond the blog. This is by far the most thorough wordpress themeing book I have found. The content within this book is dense and every bit of it is useful.

I would not recommend this book to the absolute beginner unless you really like jumping headfirst into the very deep end. You really need to have at least a moderate understanding of html css and php to get through this book. The author is able able to cover as much as he does in large part by assuming you can keep up.

The biggest problem with this book and the only reason I am not giving it 5 stars is the layout. I have heard this complaint regarding other books from smashing magazine and unfortunately it is very true. The guys at smashing mag are brilliant web designers but would do well to hire some equally brilliant print designers to layout their books. The biggest problem is the inner margins of the book. They have been designed as though this book were to be read on a vertical blog with identical margins on both pages instead of reflected margins resulting in having to force the book open to read the left page. Sorry to go on about this but it really is a big problem and I hope they will fix this in future versions (or at least in future publications).

Pros:

1. Spectacular content not found in any other single book

2. Covers up and coming wordpress features such as child themes

3. Tutorials for designing functioning job boards, faq knowledge bases, e-commerce sites, portfolio sites and more

4. 2 chapters on functions.php and plugin development

5. Too many great things content wise to list!

Cons:

1. Not recommended for the beginner

2. Layout of the book is quite poor and makes reading difficult

Overall:

If you are serious about creating your own wordpress themes and have experience with css html and php then this is absolutely the book you want.

Buy Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog now for only !

Modify Your Own WordPress Themes

This is your step-by-step video CD guide to Modifying Your Own WordPress Themes.

One of the most important parts about your Internet presence is branding. You may not even be aware that you are creating a brand whenever you create a site or a WordPress blog. If someone is reading what you have to say or buying your products you already have the elements of a brand working for you.

You should be striving to create your own brand with your Internet presence. Your brand can be your own name or the name of a business, but you need to make sure that it is getting noticed.

One way to help promote your brand is to make your sites look unique. Many people use WordPress for their blogs and their sites. The only problem is that it is not immediately straight forward how to go about modifying the WordPress themes to take maximum advantage of your brand.

I have solved that problem for you with this four part video series. You will learn how to “Dig Into the Code” to make changes to your WordPress themes, also known as, templates. Don’t worry because this is actually quite simple to do once someone shows you how. You don’t need to be at all tech savvy to change your own template.

The good thing about WordPress themes is that they have standardized file names for their different pieces. Example the side bar is called “sidebar.php” so you know that if you want to change the sidebar it

List Price: $ 39.99
Price: $ 39.99

WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook

Over 100 simple but incredibly effective recipes for creating powerful, custom WordPress themes Overview of WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook Take control of the look and feel of your WordPress site Quick recipes to get started and successfully build advanced themes Step-by-step instructions and useful screenshots for easy learning Give a professional look to your web site with popular JavaScript libraries In Detail Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site and give it a professional look, 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 and lot of issues pop up during the process. This easy-to-use step-by-step guide will help you create powerful themes for your WordPress web site, and solve your theme development problems in a quick and effective way. It enables you to take full control over your site’s design and branding and make it look smarter. WordPress is distributed with two ready-to-use themes. You can use these themes to give a common look to your website, or use the techniques described in this book to create custom themes. This book includes over 100 useful recipes to help you get started and create advanced themes. It starts with the basics of WordPress themes and creating a theme from scratch. Then, it covers how to enhance your template and add effects to get a rich look. You will learn how to manage pages, categories, and tags for

Rating: (out of 1 reviews)

List Price: $ 39.99
Price: $ 34.27

WordPress 24-Hour Trainer: Watch, Read, and Learn How to Create and Customize WordPress Sites (Book & DVD)

Don’t let WordPress intimidate you. WordPress 24-Hour Trainer is a unique lesson-based book that walks you through the essential parts of WordPress. Each lesson is streamlined to teach a specific aspect of WordPress, helping you to focus on just what you need in order to get the task accomplished. If you learn better visually, this book provides you with a video to accompany each lesson. This book is the perfect guide to Planning and preparing your site for WordPress Installing WordPress Writing, tagging, and publishing a post Working with the text editor Styling paragraphs and creating lists Working with media files Linking, aligning, and sizing an image Working with image galleries Adding video and audio Naming, scheduling, and managing posts Making your site stand out Helping others connect to your site Becoming search engine friendly Optimizing your site Backing up your site Installing and activating plugins

• ISBN13: 9780470554586
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Rating: (out of 16 reviews)

List Price: $ 44.99
Price: $ 19.18