WordPress Theme Design is a new book from PACKT publishing which is a complete guide to creating sophisticated professional themes for WordPress. The book will take you through the ins and outs of creating themes and walks 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.
Topics include:
- Setting up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design
- Creating detailed designs and coding them up
- Enhancing your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics
- Debugging and validating themes using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation tools
- Customizing and tweaking a theme’s layout
- Setting up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms
- Downloading and installing useful plug-ins and widgetize a theme
- Improving post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox
- Adding interactivity to themes using Flash
- A reference guide to WordPress 2.0’s template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions
The book is available in paperback as well as a PDF eBook version. The paperback version is $35.99, while the PDF eBook is $27.19
Go here for more information and read the full table of contents, or you can order the WordPress Theme Design book here.