This title will take you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom WordPress theme. From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through design tips and suggestions, to setting up your theme's template structure, coding markup, testing and debugging, to taking it live it reviews the best practices. The last three chapters are dedicated to additional tips, tricks and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to your WordPress theme designs using third-party plugins.

Whether you're working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give you the know-how to understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system, enabling you to take full control over your site's design and branding.

Expert guidance on designing a great theme for one of the most popular, open-source blog systems available for the Web today!

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