http://www.themedreamer.com/demos
Rating: 5 / 5

Of course there are some things you need to know on creating a WordPress theme. You could search the internet for resources on how to create your own themes on various websites, but that would take many hours and you probably would be misinformed about a few things and that would set you back awhile. Instead of wasting your time with all that, just get this book. It¡¦s a no brainer. º

This book written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, is the first book to help web designers and developers understand how to create a WordPress theme from start to finish. I have never seen a book about WordPress that covers a topic so completely. This book is definitely a book you should buy if you want to take your basic WP skills to the next level in learning more about WP in general as well as understanding how themes work and how to create them and modify existing ones.

This book has a little bit of everything¡K.From explaining the basics of WP, to the basics concepts of design, to explaining some example web site designs and how they work. Tessa goes to work (chapter 3) and explains the sections of a WP theme like the index.php, sidebar.php, header.php and footer.php. Of course the basics begin with talking about ¡§the loop¡¨ which displays all your posts in order and lets you display all your display properties of the main page. The second most important and fun part of your page is normally your sidebar.php page which you can include you main navigation, categories, search, display tagging, widgets, and other cool stuff. It is all explained in great detail with nothing left out.

I have been using WP for a while now and my site (http://www.javascriptworkshop.com) which uses WordPress is a simple design, but I cannot tell you how many hours I spent trying to figure out something that after reading this book would have helped me instantly. I wish this book came out a year ago. º

The rest of the book (chapter 5 ¡V go through creating a theme from scratch as well as troubleshooting it. I love chapter 6 and its syntax reference in reviewing very common and not so common template tags. These are predefined PHP functions that allow you to pull information from the MySQL database that every WP installation uses. Every new version of WP, changes a few of these and this book has the most up-to-date information on it. You can also go to ¡§codex¡¨ section of the WordPress.org site (http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page) to get all the information you need as well. But it will take a lot longer than using this wonderful book.

Another great chapter is chapter 8 which shows you how to add some interactive Ajax forms and content on your WP site. Ajax is something that allows you to pull information from a database (MySQL in this case) without having to refresh the page. It looks cool and if done properly can really make you site standout from the rest.

The final chapter (chapter 9) gives you some great design tips that would take hours to figure out on your own. A great extra bonus chapter.

If you are using WordPress at any level, then I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5 / 5

The book seemingly starts out simple enough. However, on page 31, is where it begins to get muddy and gets worse from here. It begins by talking about typeography and on page 33 shows an image of something that is nowhere explained as to how it came into existance. At no time that I can see that this term is explained and how that image on page 33 was created.

Upon further reading, it is easy to see that the authors are under the impression that beginners know where to start.

I’ll stick with the arduous task of trying to muddle through backward engineering current themes.

When are these people going to understand that many of us trying to learn this stuff need to have simple, step by step instructions?

Sorry, thumbs down on this one.
Rating: 2 / 5