Arbenting

Not sure if you have heard about this latest trend in the blogging and overall online data management systems, but there is this framework called ‘WordPress’ that we believe is going to be big. Like huge. In fact, we will go out on a limb and say that ‘09 is going to be the year this little guy takes off. Okay, so we are a bit behind on this one, but to be fair, we didn’t actually have a blog back when WordPress came out, so we never got to write about it like it was new. That was fun! Moving on…

Seriously though, WordPress is an unstoppable force of nature at this point, and it dominates the online content management market. Like we discussed on our friend Brian’s site over at Elite By Design, with the guest post 10 Best Free WordPress Themes You Haven’t Seen, WordPress is used on hundreds of thousands of sites, and that number is growing daily.

With the enthusiasm not slowing down, we decided that we would put together a compilation of resources that every developer working to put new themes for WordPress out into the community needs to be aware of. We hope you those interested in trying their hand at these themes will find this as useful as maybe some existing developers who may find some new places to pick up a thing or two.

Getting Started

In every journey you must have a starting point, and we believe the natural place to start would be with the following links in this case. Not really much else to say other than that.

How To Set Up WordPress on a Hard Drive

If you’re a theme developer the last thing you want to do is have to upload your files every time you want to see changes you’ve made to the theme you’re building. I did this until I discovered xampp and installed wordpress on my Hard Drive. This saved me so much time that I immediately wrote a tutorial. If you’re a new theme developer or a seasoned developer who still uploads your files to view changes, this is the first thing I would recommend doing.

Sample Post Collection

When developing wordpress themes you’re also going to need some content (posts, pages, categories, etc) to fully test the usability of your theme. WP Candy has created this simple xml file that you can import into the wordpress install that you just put on your hard drive giving you samples of everything you will need to build a theme.

Features
• Multiple posts with different elements in each
• 12 Posts to force pagination
• Blockquotes, lists – ordered and unordered – and floating images
• Comments on a few of the posts
• Parent, child, and grandchild categories and pages
• Tags
• Multiple months for the archives

Theme Frameworks

While some people prefer to build their themes from the ground up, I like to work with a bare bones theme framework giving me a foundation to build from. Here are my two favorite frameworks.

Starkers

A completely stripped down theme. If you want something super-simple to start out with, stripped down to the bare minimum of markup, use Starkers.

Features
• All non-semantic, presentational class names removed
• All non-semantic, presentational HTML elements removed
• All unnecessary elements removed
• Elements converted where necessary
• Browser defaults reset in the ‘reset.css’ to give a true clean slate

Thematic

This one comes with a bit more power originally built in. A highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins and more.

Features
• Continually advancing Search Engine optimization
• Ready for Subscribe to Comments, WP-PageNavi and Comment License
• Fully widget-ized with widget areas above and below the content—and even in-between
• A grid-based starting point based on the 960 Grid System
• CSS Reset and Typography based on Blueprint and Tripoli
• 3 Bulletproof sample Stylesheets; 2 column samples, left and right, and a 3 column stylesheet with both columns on the left
• The sample stylesheets are aligned to a strict 18px vertical grid featuring refreshing and sophisticated typography
• Built from the rock solid Sandbox, making it perfect for customization
• Editable footer text; take out the theme credits from a theme options page without harming the theme
• Options for Multi-Author blogs

Tutorials

There are very few of us that could say with a straight face that we have nothing to learn, and fewer of us who could say it with those around us keeping a straight face. To that end, here are a few fabulous tutorials that will help teach you a thing or two. Or remind you of something you learned long ago and forgot.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch

A tutorial that teaches you how to take a HTML/CSS template and turn it into a functioning WordPress theme.

Mastering WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

Developing a WordPress Theme

The Complete WordPress Theme Guide

How to Separate WordPress Comments and Trackbacks

How to Highlight Author Comments in WordPress

Reference Guides and Cheat Sheets

To make things easier on yourself, we have prepared a short list of references that will act as a veritable cheat sheet for you as you strike out on this developer’s path. Go on, feed your inner slacker.

The WordPress Help Sheet

Features
• Basic Template Files
• PHP Snippets for the Header
• PHP Snippets for the Templates
• And Extra Stuff for WordPress

WordPress Template Tag Reference Guide

A great resource that lists all tags alphabetically by type.

A Final Word

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