What this book covers

Chapter 1: Getting Started as a WordPress Theme Designer introduces you to the WordPress blog system and lets you know what you need to be aware of regarding the WordPress theme project you're ready to embark on. The chapter also covers the development tools that are recommended and web skills that you'll need to begin developing a WordPress theme.

Chapter 2: Theme Design and Approach looks at the essential elements you need to consider when planning your WordPress theme design. It discusses the best tools and processes for making your theme design a reality. The chapter explains some "rapid design comping" techniques and gives some tips and tricks for developing color schemes and graphic styles for your WordPress theme. By the end of the chapter, you'll have a working XHTML and CSS-based "comp" or mockup of your theme design, ready to be coded up and assembled into a fully functional WordPress theme.

Chapter 3: Coding It Up uses the final XHTML and CSS mockup from Chapter 2 and shows you how to add WordPress PHP template tag code to it and break it down into the template pages a theme requires. Along the way, this chapter covers the essentials of what makes a WordPress theme work and how to enable your theme to take advantage of new WordPress 2.8 features such as sticky posts and threaded comments. At the end of the chapter, you'll have a basic, working WordPress theme.

Chapter 4: Debugging and Validation discusses the basic techniques of debugging and validation that you should employ throughout your theme's development. It covers the W3C's XHTML and CSS validation services, along with how to use the Firefox browser and some of its extensions as a development tool, and not as just another browser. This chapter also covers troubleshooting some of the most common reasons "good code goes bad", especially in IE, along with best practices for fixing those problems, giving you a great-looking theme across all browsers and platforms.

Chapter 5: Putting Your Theme into Action discusses how to properly set up your WordPress theme's CSS stylesheet so that it loads into WordPress installations correctly. It also discusses compressing your theme files into the ZIP file format to share with the world and running some test installations of your theme in WordPress' Administration panel so that you can share your WordPress theme with the world.

Chapter 6: WordPress Template Tag, Function, and CSS Reference covers key information under easy-to-look-up headers that will help you with your WordPress theme development—from the CSS class styles that WordPress itself outputs, to WordPress' PHP template tags and plugin hooks, to a breakdown of "The Loop" along with additional WordPress functions and features such as shortcodes that you can take advantage of in your theme development. Information in this chapter is listed along with key links to bookmark, in order to make your theme development as easy as possible.

Chapter 7: Ajax/Dynamic content and Interactive Forms continues showing you how to enhance your WordPress theme by looking at the most popular methods for leveraging AJAX techniques in WordPress using plugins and widgets. It also gives you a complete background on AJAX and when it's best to use those techniques or skip them. The chapter also reviews some cool JavaScript toolkits, libraries, and scripts you can use to simply make your WordPress theme appear "Ajaxy".

Chapter 8: Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements dives into taking your working, debugged, validated, and properly packaged WordPress theme from the earlier chapters, and enhancing it with dynamic menus using the SuckerFish CSS-based method and Adobe Flash media.

Chapter 9: Design Tips for Working with WordPress reviews the main tips from the previous chapters and covers some key tips for easily implementing today's coolest CSS tricks into your theme, as well as a few final SEO tips that you'll probably run into once you really start putting content into your WordPress site.