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!

This post is just a heads up to let everyone know that the WordPress Hacks theme has been updated with a few new features added, courtesy of my friends at Blog Design Studio.  Some you will notice right away, while others you may not. 

Here are the notable changes included with this new update:

1. Threaded Comments – Now that the discussions have increased in the comments of our posts, I felt that it was important to support threaded comments, which became available way back when WordPress 2.7 was released.    You can now reply to individual comments without them falling all the way to the bottom of the page.
2. Twitter Integration – Twitter is quickly replacing FeedDemon as my “feed reader” of choice, and I know I’m not the only one.  As a result, I felt it was important to integrate Twitter into the WPHacks.com design.  You’ll now find recent tweets in the sidebar, a tweet this button below each of our posts, and the comments section now supports the Tweetbacks plugin, displaying your tweets about WordPress Hacks content.
3. Author Profiles – Single pages now display author profile information below each post.  If you have written for us in the past and have your own author page, you may want to contact me to request I update the information, or you can login to your author account and update your profile page!  

The remaining changes were mostly “under the hood” things done to clean up the code a little bit and make sure everything was running smoothly.  If you have any questions or notice anything that isn’t appearing correctly, please let me know!

Since missing out on the WordCamp Chicago event that took place a few months ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on upcoming WordCamp events in the hopes that one will happen here in the Midwest again.

If you’ve been considering going to one of these events, today I noticed a post from the official WordPress site listing the upcoming WordCamps, which can be viewed here.  For your reference, here are the events they list:

• WordCamp New Zealand: Wellington, New Zealand, August 8-9, 2009
• WordCamp Huntsville: Huntsville, Alabama, USA, August 15–16, 2009
• WordCamp Los Angeles: Los Angeles, California, USA, September 12, 2009
• WordCamp Philippines: Makati City, Philippines, September 19, 2009
• WordCamp Portland: Portland, Oregon, USA, September 19-20, 2009
• WordCamp Seattle: Seattle, Washington, USA, September 26, 2009
• WordCamp Birmingham: Birmingham, Alabama, USA, September 26-27, 2009
• WordCamp Netherlands: Utrecht, Netherlands, October 31, 2009
• WordCamp NYC: New York, New York, USA, November 14-15, 2009
• WordCamp Mexico: Mexico City, Mexico, November 20, 2009

It is good to see so many international WordCamps happening, as well as a few here in the United States.   If you are able to attend one of these events, I think most past WordCamp attendees would definitely recommend it.  I definitely am planning on attending the next one that takes place here in the Midwest.

Editor’s Note: Although Alex has published a few posts here in the past, he is going to ramp up his submissions over the coming weeks, so we decided he would do an introduction post.  If you’d like to write for WordPress Hacks, you can get more information here, then contact us.

After Kyle announced in his last post that he would not be able to resume WPHacks’ regular posting schedule for awhile, I volunteered to step up to the plate; for the next fortnight I’ll be taking Kyle’s place and plan to be posting at least once every other day!

Me.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m Alex Denning. I’ve written the odd post here on WordPress Hacks, as well as occasionally writing posts for CatsWhoCode and ProBlogDesign. Recently I started my own WordPress blog, WPShout.com, and I also am the editor of Nometet.com.  I’m on Twitter too!

What I’ll be posting

As I said, I’ll be posting at least once every other day with a bit of discussion, some nice WordPress hacks, some WordPress news, etc. However, I haven’t got enough post ideas for the entire two weeks; any suggestions for posts would be greatly appreciated in the comments.

A quick plug

As with everything in life, my posting here does too have an ulterior motive; I’ve briefly mentioned my blog already, but I’ll expand: my blog has just (I say just, ie today!) changed its name from Nometech.com to WPShout.com and it has also got an exciting new design. As you’re reading WordPress Hacks, that implies you’re a WordPress fan, so I’ll make a quick prod in the direction of the WPShout RSS feed; a couple of times a week I publish in depth posts related to WordPress. I’d hope the content speaks for itself, so go take a look!

Wrapping up

I think that’s everything! As I said, any post suggestions or questions?  Please do leave a comment below, and here’s to an excellent next two weeks!

I’ve received a few inquiries this weekend expressing their concern over the lack of posts published here the past few weeks.   To those who noticed, I appreciate the concern!   Unfortunately, I do not draw my entire income online at this point in my life and my day job has required me to work 60+ hour weeks for the last few months.   It appears this trend will be continuing over the next few weeks at least, so it may be a bit before I am able to resume my regular posting schedule that our long time readers have enjoyed for the past couple years.

I’ve also noticed that I’m not the only one who hasn’t posted much lately, as it seems most of the WordPress blogs that were active a year ago are rarely updated these days.   I think this shows just how hard it is to maintain a blog over several years with regular updates.   That said, a next generation of WordPress bloggers have really stepped up to fill this void.   If you are looking to get your fill of WordPress related content, here are a few WordPress websites or blogs which are updated regularly:

1. Weblog Tools Collection (I know this one isn’t new, but is still updated regularly)
2. WordPress Tavern (WordPress blog and active forums)
3. WordPress Recipes (Regularly posted WordPress code snippets)

If you aren’t already, make sure you are tracking these three websites!