Product Description: This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up your WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up your theme's template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add your own custom 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 effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling you to have full control over your site's design and branding.
All the information with too much chat *WordPress: Theme Design* has a lot of very useful information, but you have to wade through an awful lot of the Tessa Blakely Silver's opinions and her obvious irritation with her clients in order to get to it. It would benefit from a layout in which her side comments were kept on the sidelines (so you could skip them).
If you are looking for a beginning book on CSS, you would do better to look at *Stylin' for the Web*, by Charles Wyke-Smith and just skip the CSS section here. As for setting up the PHP code in your WordPress pages, I am no expert, but I am willing to bet that someone has done it better. The presentation of the material is not well organized.
This book would be improved if the text were pruned by at least 1/3, with all the chat eliminated and the text edited for logical flow. If you can get it cheap or from your public library, get it; but it's definitely not worth $40.
Useful but not authoritative... I really like many aspects of this book: the conversational style, the obvious knowledge of the author. But it goes against many of the principles of CSS that I have followed for years. For example, it suggests sizing fonts with pixels.
The book also gives you some vanilla page layout techniques but doesn't give you the details of how to make sure that they work. If layouts don't work, you're stuck with cookie cutter ideas and no troubleshooting advice.
I'm back to searching for a better book.
Good for beginners: Review by Tod McKenna of blog.todmeansfox.com Well written. Good tips. Too short. Not a reference book. Hardly a "complete" guide.
I found most of the book to be fairly basic, but I am experienced in designing standards-compliant sites using the tools and technologies Tessa uses (PHP, CSS, XHTML, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc..). I suspect that others with similar backgrounds would find this book not so helpful. For those just starting with CSS and XHTML, this book would be a good starting point though. It is filled with good advice (the best advice is to use standards-based approaches and to separate content from design) and lots of tips ranging from SEO to Photoshop techniques.
With Tessa's conversational writing approach, you feel that she's your tutor who genuinely wants you to create great, standards-compliant WordPress themes. She talks with you and not at you making the book easy to read and understand. Some key highlights include:
1. Rapid Design Comping - which is a design process coined by Tessa that takes you through ten steps of the design process from sketching to production.
2. Great section on font choices and why you might use one font over another.
3. A good discussion on validating pages through the W3C's XHTML and CSS validation services.
4. A good introduction on WordPress' template hierarchy. This is very important to understand when developing WP themes. I would have liked an entire chapter on this, though.
One thing I found totally absent (aside from a quick mention in a sidebar note) is a discussion and walkthrough of WordPress' OOP design. Just as it is important as a WP theme developer to understand the template system, good CSS, and XHTML, it is equally important to understand WP's object oriented design. An entire chapter, early on in the book, could have been written to discuss this. Tessa would have made it simple and easy to understand, I am sure.
I would have liked a better reference section. With a better reference section, I would be more apt to keep the book on my desk. As it is now, it will likely sit on the shelf never to be read again!
Tessa creates a single theme in the book (an Open Source Magazine), and although most of the techniques apply across many different types of themes, having a few counter examples would get you started more quickly.
One key point not stressed enough in her text is the notion of reusability. The WordPress architecture makes it highly reusable (not just flexible) so that you can call a single function under different circumstances to bring back data for different contexts. This is a powerful design feature (well known to those object-oriented developer types) that can save you time and effort, while delivering consistent and predictable results. As I have used WordPress now on several of my sites, I find this to be one of its strongest assets. When developing new themes, I feel that this point should be made crystal clear.
Additionally, I think that a better discussion on some of WP's core functions, and perhaps how they can and should be implemented, should have been included.
All said, this is pretty good starter book. As an experienced developer (not a WP theme developer though), I didn't get much out of it.
Good Book. A must for theming I think this is a very good book, because it is the only book on theme design for WordPress. I used it together with the DVD "How to Theme WordPress" by Aleks Monahan. The topic is very hard to find practical and organized information on, so I'm very glad I found those 2 resources. The book takes longer to read and go through, so I switched from the book to the DVD to get a boost in speed, because the DVD was much easier to watch. The DVD takes 2 hours to go through, and I felt confident afterwards to go ahead and start my own project. I will likely be referring to the book later when I have more time to read it. But in general, I think the 2 go hand in hand.
WordPress Theme Design is a winner. I am pretty impressed with this book. It is easy to read and follow. I have been working with WordPress for quite a while and developed several plugins. I bought this book to help me with Theme Design which I hadn't done previously. I was a bit surprised to find quite a few things I didn't know about WordPress itself in addition to an excellent explanation on theme design and how themes work in the context of WordPress.
This book isn't magic though - designing a theme for WordPress still requires a reasonable understanding of PHP.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
