Getting Started with Themes in WordPress (2012)

One of the best things about WordPress is how themes let you customize the way your site looks and works. Though there are lots themes available for free, you may want to create your own in order to communicate your unique online identity. In this workshop developer and trainer Joe Chellman shows you two approaches to creating a theme. You’ll learn how to create a child theme from an existing theme, using the current default theme, Twenty Twelve, as an example. You’ll also learn how take a single, static HTML file (with attendant CSS and image files) and build it into a WordPress theme with support for widgetized sidebars and custom menus.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to use WordPress themes to customize the way your website looks and works. The contents of this course include:

Introduction to WordPress Themes
In this chapter, we’ll establish a starting point for the rest of the course, both in terms of setup and in terms of knowledge. We define our terms, look at the software we’ll be using, and set up the development environment.

Codeless Theming: Child Theming with CSS
In this chapter, we’ll look at the (possibly) surprising variety of customizations that can be made through child theming, without using a lick of PHP.

Adding PHP to the Child Theme
A little bit of PHP goes a long way, as you’ll see in this chapter. By overriding and extending the PHP files from the parent theme, we can unlock almost limitless power to customize a WordPress theme. This chapter introduces some of the simplest and most useful functions you can use when adding PHP to child theming.

Customizing the Admin Dashboard
The WordPress Administrative Dashboard looks the same on nearly every WordPress site, which might lead you to believe it can’t, or shouldn’t, be customized. The active theme can in fact modify the admin section, although it won’t necessarily look like the rest of the active theme, as the examples in this chapter will demonstrate.

Introduction to Theming from Scratch
While creating a child theme allows for a lot of power and convenience, sometimes only a custom standalone theme will do. In this chapter we’ll begin building a theme from scratch using a preexisting static design built with HTML and CSS.

Refining and Adding to the Theme
In this chapter, we’ll continue the work on our custom theme, adding more template files to make it more modular and replacing more static elements with their dynamic WordPress equivalents.

The lessons are wrapped in a feature-rich interface that lets you jump to any topic and bookmark individual sections for later review. Full-Screen mode provides a hi-def, immersive experience, and Watch-and-Work mode shrinks the video into a small window so you can play the videos alongside your application. Also included are exercise files that give you an easy way to try out the techniques you learn.