Review of WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver

WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver
By PACKT Publishing

I recently read WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver with the hope that it would shed some light on the mysteries of how to create a theme that better represented my site. I am, admittedly, a novice at both WordPress and PHP programming, so I dove into this book with the understanding that I could be getting in over my head.

I was right! I am not ready to design my own themes yet, though I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding theme design. While I couldn’t follow everything that was covered in the book, it did deepen my understanding of:

• PHP coding by carefully walking me through the process of initial page design in PHP, and the use of loops.
• Coding for multiple browser support
• How the theme is laid out both in CSS and in the directory structure
• Design Methodologies
• Troubleshooting

The author did a great job of carefully going over each step as you are guided through the creation of a magazine style theme. The author also includes a basic reference at the end to help you in your own design process.

The only short falling I saw with WordPress Theme Design is that it is for a slightly outdated version of WordPress now (2.5 and currently WordPress is on 2.8.4) and the lack of a companion CD with the software you would need to host your own local blog for testing (though they do tell you what to download at the beginning if you want to pursue it).

While I did not get the example theme that you are walked through in WordPress Theme Design to be fully functional (yet), this book did help me to understand enough to take an existing theme and begin to tweak it to be more in line with what I want. I have every confidence that I will be able to come back to this book to create my own theme once I have spent some more time working with WordPress .