Creating a WordPress theme from scratch is not hard. I’ll hold your hand through it.
Tutorials on this topic have been written before and the WordPress Codex also has guides for you to follow. But are those tutorials and guides really helpful to you when you don’t understand the lingo? Even I got lost while reading the WordPress guides.
Tools – Before we get started tomorrow, you’ll need:
- WordPress installed on your computer. Follow the instructions on Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP. If you can’t install WordPress on your computer for whatever reason, no worries, just make a dummy WordPress install on your website.
- Notepad or other text editors. I use Notepad.
- SmartFTP – If you’ll be testing your theme online, I’d suggest that you download and install SmartFTP or another FTP program to upload your theme files.
- Bookmark XHTML Validator and CSS Validator. You’ll need those tools to validate your theme. They also come in handy when you need to spot and fix errors. Recently, I visited a WordPress powered site, TechEngage with a lot of customizations of a premium theme. So, yes, you can use this guide to make customizations to your existing theme as well.
Complete Lessons Listing
#1 Intro
#2 Template Files and Templates
#3 Starting Index.php
#4 Header Template
#4b Header Template Continues
#5 The Loop
#5b The Content
#5c Postmetadata
#5d Else, Post ID, Link Title
#5e Posts Nav Link
#6 Sidebar (and Categories)
#6b Page-Link Listing (wp_list_pages)
#6c Get Archives and Links
#6d Search Form and Calendar
#6e Widgetizing Sidebar
#7 Footer
#8 How to Validate
#9 Style.css and CSS Intro
#10 hex Codes and Styling Links
#11 Widths and Floats
#12 Post Formatting and Miscellaneous
#13 Styling Sidebar
#14 Footer and Dividing Index
#15 Sub-template Files
#16 Comments Template