Creating a WordPress theme

I’ve only so much patience for looking at and tinkering with other people’s code but despite the plethora of offerings out there, many very good, I’ve yet to find one that matches my particular needs… clean, accessible, easily editable and ummm, flawless. Not asking much, you’d think, eh!

My first instinct at running into a brick wall with the Simplicity theme (mentioned the other day) was to hack sections out of the actual WP base, but while I’m willing to hammer it into shape it’s not the solution, certainly can’t ask others to do that on a live site. Second thought was to tear the Simplicity to pieces and rebuild it. Final thought was, sod that, I’ll make a better one.

Took me a while to find the right music to rock to as I browsed scores of “How to…” guides. Finally settled on Cher’s ‘The beat goes on’

While I start ripping the default theme to bare core elements and rebuilding it, here’s the best site(s) I’ve found on the topic:

• Jonathan Wold’s WordPress theme tutorial – code orientated
• Themetation: How to create wordpress themes from scratch: part-1 – Photoshop orientated
• WordPress Templates codex – from the horse’s mouth!
• Also ordered a few books like:
  • WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver
  • WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder
  • and WordPress Plug-in Development by Vladimir Prelovac

As an aside, also ordered a copy of ‘The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite’ by Rich Bowen, see if I can find a clean solution to sorting out the search engine canonisation issues for WordPress sites (etc) that use custom permalinks in sub directories. Most suggestions and fixes I’ve looked at so far all WP is in the root directory, however if it’s in a sub directory like /blog it send the browser (and thus searchbots) into a loop. Did see one hack to break the loop but it can put a strain on the server and, again, not good for SEO.