WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

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 the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the 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 WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.

Whether users are working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give them the know-how to effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling them to have full control over their site’s design and branding. Users only need to be comfortable with the basics of web development and this book will take care of the rest.

What you will learn from this book



Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design

Create detailed designs and code them up

Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics

Debug and validate your theme using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation tools

Customize and tweak your theme’s layout

Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms

Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme

Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox

Add interactivity to your themes using Flash

Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0′s template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions



Chapter 1 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 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 author explains her own ‘Rapid Design Comping’ technique 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 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. At the end of the chapter, you’ll have a basic, working WordPress theme.

Chapter 4 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 and how to use the FireFox browser and some of its extensions as a development tool, not just another browser. This chapter also covers troubleshooting some of the most common reasons ‘good code goes bad’, especially in IE, and best practices for fixing those problems, giving you a great-looking theme across all browsers and platforms.

Chapter 5 discuss how to properly set up your WordPress theme’s CSS style sheet so that it loads into WordPress installations correctly. It also discuss compressing your theme files into the ZIP file format and running some test installations of your theme package in WordPress’s administration panel so you can share your WordPress theme with the world.

Chapter 6 covers key information under easy-to-look-up headers that will help you with your WordPress theme development, from the two CSS class styles that WordPress itself outputs, to WordPress’s PHP template tag code, to a breakdown of “The Loop” along with WordPress functions and features you can take advantage of in your theme development. Information in this chapter is listed along with key links to bookmark to make your theme development as easy as possible.

Chapter 7 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 8 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 9 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.

For more details on the book please visit http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-theme-design/book.

If you feel your wordpress blog is running slow, especially when you want to post a news, and if your blog is have more than hundred of posts, it might be your wordpress database is too large so that every query called from the admin panel or via your theme/template is slowly executed by the server.

To do some optimization I recommend using WP-DBManager plugin which provides this functionality as well as database backup, this is important for any blog installation. Database tables should be periodically optimized (and repaired if necessary) for optimum performance. Simply install the plugin if you don’t want to optimize it via such tools like phpmyadmin or any others.

WordPress 2.6 added a cool features when post version tracking mechanism was introduced. For example, every time you “Save” a post, a revision is written to the database. If you do not really need this feature you can easily turn it off by adding one line to your wp-config.php file, found in the installation directory of your WordPress site:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

If you have run a blog with revisions turned on for a while, chance is you will have a lot of revision posts in your database. if you wish to remove them for good, simply run this query (for example using the mentioned WP-DBManager) plugin.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

This will remove all “revision” posts from your database, making it smaller in the process.

NOTE: Do this with care. If you are not sure what you are doing, make sure to at least create a backup of the database first or even better, ask a professional to help you.

This WordPress plugin turns your normal search string from:

http://www.domain.com/?s=search-term

into

http://www.domain.com/search/search-term

This plugin removes the unnecessary “?” and converts spaces (%20) into plus sign “+”, making your wordpress search string more readable, and looks good for search engine optimization.

Click here to download this plugin.

After the official release of wordpress 2.6 that i wrote yesterday, i also doing major upgrade to this blog which was using wordpress 2.5.1 as the publishing system, and so what can i say about the newest wordpress release? whoaaa… awesome!!

The main novelties are heading for WordPress 2.6 revisions, which allows a comparison of current and older versions of content; Press This is a bookmarklet which simplifies the process of creating content and links to other sites Google Gears support, which accelerates many publishing using a local cache for some pages, and the topic Overview support, which allows the administrator to preview their site will be with a new user interface, without pushing the life. These are all welcome additions, and they are based on the top of an already mature, feature-rich core.

Small improvements have been the icing on the cake for 2.6. What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editing is generally better with a better image, integrated word, and renewed TinyMCE. A number of improvements to security at their disposal, including improved support SSL, and a number of improvements cookies and a database of interaction.

Whenever a major upgrade to a software arises, backward compatibility is a concern. With nearly 2 million downloads of WordPress 2.5, it is an incumbent users to consider. Fortunately WordPress 2.6 is fully compatible, including plug-ins, so that the upgrade should be easy. Fresh also installs a breeze, as WordPress continues its tradition of a simple less minutes to install.

WordPress 2.6 was officially released today. Matt surprised many of us to release the WordPress 2.6 nearly one month ahead of schedule. There are several new features of WordPress 2.6, some of them, we covered the period from the past. WordPress team also created a video which shows that the new features of the package with WordPress 2.6.

It is not never had no reason not to use the management interface, but said that the versatility and flexibility of WordPress, many people are using, and built the software, which is against you here.

WordPress 2.6 to use Google Gears, which is available on the acceleration is a cache of static images, which are established every time you visit your WordPress admin panel. Here is the embed media to show what’s new in WordPress 2.6:

Don’t forget to download it as soon as possible, and so, this blog also proudly powered by WordPress 2.6