Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to my local WordPress Developer Meetup group on an introduction to WordPress theme development.
Ultimately, the goal was to give a foundational talk so that more advanced topics in theme development could be shared throughout the rest of the year all of which I’d love to continue to share here, should it pan out.
The Presentation: An Introduction
Anyway, I shared a bit more about the meetup and the talk at WP Daily.
In general, my talk included the following topics:
- What is a theme?
- What makes up a theme?
- A look at
style.css - Understanding Templates
- Understanding The Purpose of
functions.php
The slides that I used are available here:
In the future, we’re considering recording these talks for others to view (and with WordPress.tv now accepting videos, it should be easy, right?).
Post Meta (Get It?)
After the talk, there was also some great discussion on the different in presentation and functionality and how this works with themes and plugins, as well as discussion around post formats, hacking a theme, starter themes, and so on.
Ultimately, I had a great time. I think that discussing theme development is something that the WordPress community is currently doing at a higher level in terms of defining what should go into a theme and what should go into a plugin.
Furthermore, I think that those of us who create themes and/or plugins need to be prepared to give interested developers a solid introduction to theme development so that we start them off on the right path. I know that I had to fumble my way through and lost a lot of time when I first got started.
I want to help others avoid the same pitfalls, so I enjoy giving talks on exactly this. And I’m sure I’ll cover this in more detail in a future post.
I hope you do’nt mind me saying but your handwriting is not very legible
I definitely don’t mind. In fact, I give a disclaimer at the beginning of every talk that if they can’t read what I’ve written, just let me know.
But you know what’s funny? You’re the first person in a year who has said it isn’t legible. Everyone else asks me what font I use #LOL. I guess I could sell it and market it as “Illegible.”
I have one question. Im so curious have you got your favourite (or your own) base which you use as a foundation to build new site on WordPress? You talking about this one https://github.com/tommcfarlin/WordPress-Settings-Sandbox but it is not decent example of foundation of WP site as author told.
For the type of projects that I work on, I usually either start with an blank slate or with something like underscores.
The WordPress Settings Sandbox is actually my own work that I used to demo the Settings API for a blog series a while back.
During the presentation, I was quick to point out that I don’t recommend using it as a foundation, but as a way to show how few files are required to actually get a theme going in WordPress.