This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to create custom themes using WordPress. By learning how to develop themes, you will discover how to build more than a simple website. You will create a reusable product that can even be redistributed and marketed.

The Web Developer's Guide to WordPress

Preface

Getting Started

In this chapter, we learn the most basic structure of a WordPress theme. In this first part, following the project proposed by the book, you will watch the birth of your first theme.

WordPress Theme Structure - Getting Started (part 1)

In this second part, you will understand how to organize the internal structure of the theme. So far, except for menus, nothing in your theme can connect the pages. Building those links will bring your theme to life and make it very dynamic.

WordPress Theme Structure - Getting Started (part 2)

Congratulations on getting this far. At this point, you have a comprehensive view of how to build a WordPress theme. Starting from this chapter, you will learn tools that will make your theme even more interactive and dynamic.

Exploring the Theme Customizer

At this point, if you decide to remove all the code related to features we haven't implemented yet (for example, a couple of elements in template-home.php and header.php), you will see that the theme will work correctly as an ordinary blog.

Making the theme compatible with WooCommerce

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of the internationalization of WordPress themes.

Internationalization - making the theme translation ready

As a rule, you can not completely rely on the type of data provided by your theme user. Your task, as a theme developer, is to keep all data input and output as safe as possible.

Security

So far, this book has been aimed either at developers interested in creating themes for themselves, for a specific client, or the ones who want to create themes for redistribution. The particular chapter is still interesting for all developers but is especially aimed at the latter. If you don't have plans to redistribute your theme, you'll already be satisfied with what you've learned so far. I suggest you go straight to Appendix A of this book and learn how to send the site to a live server of your choice.

Submitting a theme to WordPress.org - part 1

In this second part, you will learn how to package the theme for redistribution, as well as create an easy to install the demo version, put the finishing touches to the files, and finally understand how to submit the theme for review and publication.

Submitting a theme to WordPress.org - part 2

Not all readers will be interested in learning how to redistribute the theme. For those only interested in creating a theme to use on a single website and put it online, I have prepared this tutorial. This is a simple tutorial to be used by those who use shared hosting only. It is not recommended for those who use VPS.

Appendix A - Migrating a WordPress site from the localhost to a live server

The following are solutions to the most frequent problems that may arise while developing WordPress themes.

Appendix B - Frequently Asked Questions

This tutorial can be very helpful if you are a Mac OS X user and notice that WordPress cannot create the wp-config.php file automatically with every new installation. It will also be useful in cases where WordPress repeatedly requests FTP credentials when you try to install a plugin or a theme.

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