The past year or so has seen a massive rise in the popularity of WordPress, particularly the idea of using WordPress as a CMS to run literally any type of site. You’ll now see WordPress not only powering blogs, but major news sites, eCommerce sites, Twitter clones, the lot. The massive rise in WordPress’ popularity is in one part thanks to themes. We’re now seeing premium WordPress theme companies pop up everywhere, with free themes pouring out from all over the place too.
Making the switch from blogger to becoming a WordPress theme developer is something that a lot of people find a daunting prospect. And with good reason – all those bits of PHP, CSS, HTML! Scary stuff. But it needn’t be. And now it won’t be either:-
Last week on WPShout I ran “A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Theme Development“. It was more or less just about that – a guide for the beginner WordPress theme developer looking at all of the daunting and different theme files. The series ran over the whole of last week and today has reached its climax with the release of a free eBook which contains the whole series. Over the week, the series looked at all the aspects of a WordPress theme, starting with the fundamentals of any WordPress theme, next moving onto the index.php file. It then looks at the header, sidebar and footer files. Next was the single.php file and finally the other files a WordPress theme has.
The eBook is twenty one pages, 3,508 words and five chapters, with the table of contents as follows:
- Chapter 1: The fundamentals of any WordPress theme.
- Chapter 2: The index.php and style.css files.
- Chapter 3: The header, sidebar and footer.
- Chapter 4: The single, comments and page files.
- Chapter 5: The archive, home and functions files.
As I said, the eBook is free, so download it, soak up the information and become an awesome WordPress theme developer!
Alex Denning
Alex Denning blogs about all things WordPress, including WordPress theme development and web design, over at WordPress Shout.
I am looking forward to using the ScribeSEO tool with my wordpress site. Thanks. 
Thanks a Lot. It was really very helpful for me :) 
How to make the posts section of the WP static? 
reaally excelent job. thanks 
Thanks I have been trying to figure this out for awhile now. I knew it wasn't that hard I ...
Thanks for your effort. Nice work. Keep posting such thing. 
Great stuff!! Exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been looking for ebooks, guides, tutorials and anything to educate myself on wordpress theme development for a while now but thee is always something missing.
Thanks again for sharing the ebook.
I’m a graphic designer and though there are tons (!) of free wordpress themes, I cannot find the one that suits my specific needs. How much would it cost me to hire a professional wp coder/CSS guru/wordpress theme developer? I’d deliver the homepage and subpages (up to 4) as a photoshop template, along with instructions, how it should work.
I can help you out with everything wordpress. Shoot me an email at mattvstheworld [at] gmail.com
It’s always great to see someone giving something away. Well as for myself I am not so much a wordpress builder I am more of a blogger.
Cool. Thanks for the ebook link, I will check it out.
Thank you for a valuable resource. Like cbreceipt, I am more a blogger than a designer, but all knowledge is useful when you are trying to build your WordPress skills.
It’s interesting reading this blog post, I’m in the verge of entering the premium theme space…however in my case I’m not a developer and currently in search of a developer partner who will handle the design department while I handle conceptualisation and marketing department.
I’ve identified a gap in the premium themes market, where we’ll be exclusively developing themes for a particular industry.
I’m more informed about this particular industry and know what has to be developed for the market.
What is better, go into partnership with a developer or hire a developer?
Thanks for information.
I’ve been struggling to make a theme work the way I need it to, so now the time has come to start tweaking, and my first step is going to be downloading this ebook and actually reading the thing! Thanks for helping WordPress newbs out, wphacks!