Building WordPress Themes from Scratch: A New Book From One of Our Wptuts+ Authors

Today we’re announcing the launch of a new Rockable Press book, Building WordPress Themes from Scratch by our very own Wptuts+ author Joe Casabona!

Some Words From the Author

Hi, I’m Joe, the author of Building WordPress Themes From Scratch, and what started out as a simple, open source blogging platform has now become a super-powerful content management system (CMS) that can boast that it’s the most widely-used CMS on the Internet.

From the moment I first started using WordPress about eight years ago, I fell in love with it straight away and immediately started hacking away at it, learning the platform, making my own changes, and watching it grow over the years.

In this book, I plan to teach you how to use WordPress, as well as how to leverage the API to create your own custom themes, plugins, and content types. In other words, I will show you how to make WordPress your own.

What Does Joe Cover in the Book?

This book reads much like a long, multi-part tutorial, where I take you through my design process, explaining what I do (and why I do it) every step of the way.

Although it’s a fairly linear guide, my hope is that you can visit any main section of the book for quick reference.

So, here’s what I’ll be doing:

1. Converting HTML/CSS to a Dynamic WordPress Theme

   Included with the book is a PSD that I’ve transformed into HTML. The first part of this book will be taking the resulting HTML/CSS and converting it to a WordPress theme. Along the way, I’ll talk about the various theme pages we’re working with, the WordPress theme hierarchy, and of course, the WordPress Loop.

2. Creating a Custom Post Type

   This, in my humble opinion, is one of the best additions to WordPress in recent releases. With the ability to make your own content types – each with its own theme template – you can take WordPress from being a CMS only limited to blog posts and pages, to a CMS that can manage any kind of content you can imagine. In this book, we’ll be creating a business listing type, which will allow us to create a business directory.

3. Theme Options and Widgets

   With WordPress, you can make a theme your own by adding a ‘theme options’ page and custom widgets. In this section, we’ll make it very easy for people who use our themes to add their own customizations without delving into the code or creating a child theme.

4. Creating a Plugin

   One of the most powerful facets of WordPress is the fact that it’s pluggable. We can add functionality to our installation of WordPress without changing the core WordPress files. There are vast directories of both free and premium plugins available that vastly expand the capabilities of WordPress. In this final section of this book, we will build our own plugin.

Awesome! Where Can We Get a Copy?

You can buy the book from Rockable Press for $19 (or $29 for the paperback)

We hope you enjoy the book, and if you still need any convincing, check out the sample linked above.