Welcome to WordPress 3.2 Theme Design! This book is intended to take you through the process of creating sophisticated professional themes for the WordPressweb publishing platform. Since its inception, WordPress has evolved way beyond mere blogging capabilities and has many standard features that are expandable with content types, plugins, and widgets, which make it comparable to a full Content Management System (CMS).
In this chapter and upcoming chapters, we'll walk through:
- The perks of using WordPress and basics of how a theme works
- The core technology you should understand and tools you should use to develop your theme
- The essential elements you need to consider when planning your theme design
- An overview of theme development strategies
- Starting with semantic HTML5 markup
- An overview of typography for the web
- Using a CSS layout framework
- Sizing typography with ems
- Using "object-oriented CSS" techniques for graphic treatments
- Setting up your WordPress theme design process
This chapter is mostly the background and overview of the key concepts you'll need to understand once it's "time for action" in the following chapters. Let's get started.
As you're interested in generating custom themes for WordPress, you'll be very happy to know (especially all you web standards evangelists) that WordPress really does separate content from design.
You may already know from painful experience that many content management and blog systems end up publishing their content prewrapped in (sometimes large) chunks of layout HTML, peppered with all sorts of predetermined selector id and class names.
You usually have to do a fair amount of sleuthing to figure out what these IDs and classes are so that you can create custom CSS rules for them. This is very time consuming.
The good news is, WordPress publishes only two things:
- The site's textual content—the text you enter into the post and the page administration panels
- Supplemental site content such as widgets, banners, and menus, wrapped in
divtags,litags, ornavtags depending on how the theme is coded
WordPress can also include classes which let you add styling based on a variety of circumstances. Most of those classes are controlled directly by he template tags (which we'll get into later).
That's it! You decide how everything published via WordPress is styled and displayed.
The culmination of all those styling and display decisions, along with WordPress template tags that pull your site's content into your design, are what your WordPress theme consists of.