Build Your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes [Paperback]

Alan Cole (Author), Raena Jackson Armitage (Author), Brandon R. Jones (Author), Jeffrey Way (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2010

Wicked WordPress Themes is a step-by-step guide to creating beautiful themes for the world's most popular CMS, WordPress.

By following the book's advice, readers can produce designs that are aesthetically stunning, consistent, and for-purpose -whether it's for their own use, or to drive a high price on the theme marketplace.

All facets of theme design are covered: from design, coding, and deployment, to ensuring readers' designs are ready-to-go as soon as they're installed.

Wicked WordPress Themes teaches readers how to leverage theme design frameworks to dramatically shorten development time, enabling them to enter the theme market faster.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Allan Cole is a web designer and developer based in Brooklyn, NY and is widely known as a Thematic framework guru. He specializes in front-end user experience and WordPress customization.

Raena Jackson Armitage is an Australian web developer with a background in content management and training. A former SitePoint technical editor, you’ll find her speaking at some of the more popular geek conferences.

Brandon R. Jones has developed some of the Web's best-selling WordPress themes. He has a strong background in graphic design, digital illustration, and user interface design.

Jeffrey Way manages CodeCanyon, an online code marketplace, and Nettuts, a popular web development tutorial site. He also ran the biggest online marketplace for buying and selling WordPress themes—Theme Forest—for 2 years.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: SitePoint; Pap/Psc edition (September 4, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0980455294
• ISBN-13: 978-0980455298
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Home Computing > Blogging & Blogs
  • #100 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development > Web Services

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good intro to WordPress theme building, August 22, 2010

By 

Jason E. Rice (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Build Your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes (Paperback)

I received the book Friday afternoon (8/20/2010) and finished reading it Sunday (8/22/2010), and my head is still spinning ... but in a good way. I am about three weeks new to WordPress, and I have to say that it's overwhelming trying to learn about everything that makes it what it is. I had been reading through the codex ([...]), which is a tremendous resource by the WordPress folks, but it has been difficult for me to tie it all together. This book is a great primer to theme building with WordPress and will help you to understand the main components that make up the WordPress software, and it does so in a pleasant and organized way. I dabble in web design, but my profession is that of web development and programming, and I'm pleased to say that this book, while aimed at web designers, will encourage the curiosity of developers alike.

I had some reservations about the book having four authors, as the flow of a tech book doesn't always work when there are too many "experts" coming to the table. I'm pleased to say that the book flows quite well, and the language and format with which the authors use to explain theme building is mostly consistent and cohesive. The only problem I had was in chapter 7: Theme Options, as it felt like the author of this chapter was jumping around a bit and not quite as organized and detailed with some of the explanations, and perhaps rushing a bit. Otherwise, I now feel much more confident in WordPress and theme building from not only a 10,000 foot view, but a 1,000 foot view as well. As with anything tech, you have to "pop the hood", and get your hands dirty, and I now feel like I can thanks to this book.

The book is broken into 8 chapters ... interestingly, each chapter fundamentally builds upon the last, but you could easily make a quick pass through the book to get familiarized with WordPress and themes, and then use it as a high-level reference thereafter (and using the codex will probably make much more sense after moving through this book). The chapters are:

1. Introducing WordPress
2. Planning Your Theme
3. Theme Design 101
4. Theme Frameworks
5. Advanced Theme Construction
6. Widgets
7. Theme Options
8. Selling Your Theme

I bought this book with two ideas in mind: learn about the "guts" of WordPress from a high level, and understand what goes into a WordPress theme to eventually make and sell them, and the book moves you forward in the right direction. This book, IMO, does a very good job of covering a great deal of ground in a short amount of time. I have only started to work on converting my business website to WordPress, but this book, and the information in it, has given me the confidence to play and experiment, and really go after the inner workings of the Thematic framework.

Thanks to SitePoint for a great book on the topic!

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for the Wordpress developer with averange coding skills, September 15, 2010

By 

riddix - See all my reviews

This review is from: Build Your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes (Paperback)

I read my decent share of Wordpress books so far, probably a dozen of them. So far this is one of the better ones, maybe the best, at least for me. Personally I am a designer with some basic coding skills in PHP. Setting up scripts from scratch is something I am not too good at, but I can understand scripts by reading them and tweaking them to my needs. This book helped me to understand PHP a little more and especially the ins and outs of Wordpress.

This book is probably not the best book to read in order to get rolling with your theme development, it is a bit too advanced for that. But after one or two other books serving you the typical spoon-fed chunks of what Wordpress is and how to install it, this book is great. It introduces you to the concept of frameworks, child-themes and action-hooks and filters. This might scare a lot of people away, but once you get the hang of it you will love the concept. If you are serious about developing professional themes you have to read this book.

There is an ebook version available as well.

44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It was not what I expected, September 8, 2010

By 

David Valencia - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Build Your Own Wicked Wordpress Themes (Paperback)

The major part of the book is a showcase of wordpress powered websites. I have an intermediate level of wordpress I was expecting learn a few things or tricks for work with wordpress as a CMS. But after a looot of images and zero code, they begin "Building a Theme" and it's just create a child theme for Thematic. I think the fun part of wordpress it is build a theme from scratch.

It's a shame because I'm a big fan of sitepoint I own a couple more of books from theme but this one is just a showacase, that's it.