cre8d design

There’s quite a variety of WordPress books out there for sale and I regularly have a flick through new ones which come out but usually don’t feel compelled to purchase them.  I was recently sent a copy of WordPress 2.8 Theme Design by Tessa Blakely Silver to review and I was pleasantly surprised.

The book is an incredible helpful guide to anyone starting out, or even intermediate WordPress users looking to create their own themes from scratch.  The book is conversational but not to the point of being waffly or frustrating.  It’s full of helpful little tips along the way about the general process of making a theme and even just rapid prototyping and designing in general – not just a book full of code snippets which can easily be found by using Google or the WordPress codex. I liked her insights and approach for sketching, wireframing and coding early on even though I’ve been designing WordPress themes for years it’s always handy to see a fresh perspective on the process.

There’s plenty of practical and common types of things you’ll want to add onto your theme, such as plugins and widgets.  Alongside this, you’re given information on a wide variety of tools that most web developers usually have at their disposal for handling the technical side of managing sites, especially bug testings.

The book is a good mix of advice, non-technical and technical information.  Parts of it you may want to skip over on first read and use more as a reference – not every theme has all the complexities mentioned in the book.  It’s not exhaustive, but again that’s where the codex and Google come in handy.

There’s a little on adapting other themes and frameworks are mentioned but if you’re looking to work with Thesis or adapt an existing theme, this book will be helpful but not provide the answers you’re probably looking for.  One thing I’ve come to learn after looking at so many themes is that while there’s a lot in common, they do take quite a bit of tuning in to, to understand how the theme author has organized things, especially with the more complex themes.  Some themes have been designed for maximum flexibility – within a certain set of parameters – and if you go outside these changes, it can become a bit of a nightmare.  Other themes haven’t come with all the bells and whistles of their own administration interface but are quicker to adapt.

While WordPress 2.9.2 is already out, there will be little information in this book which is dated and in fact, screenshots of WordPress’ administration area are minimal.

My only criticism of the book would be that I would have loved to have seen a few more case studies (or mini-case studies) of building a theme, rather than just one long in-depth one on building a magazine-type theme. These days there’s so many different types of WordPress themes out there, used for so many different purposes.

Chapters are: Getting started, Theme Design and Approach, Coding it Up, Debugging and Validation, Putting Your Theme Into Action, WordPress Template Tag, Function and CSS Reference, AJAX/Dynamic Content and Interactive Forms, Dynamic Menus and Interactive Elements, Design Tips for Working with WordPress (including SEO).

For more see: WordPress 2.8 Theme Design