Create Your Own Wordpress Themes + Plugins June 30, 2006
(Listen to article)
If you’re a fan of the WordPress blogging platform, you’re probably well aware of the wide range of plugins and page themes that are available - many for free. While this weblog is generally aimed at bloggers/ online writers who want to tweak their existing blog platform setup, occasionally you may want to write your own themes and plugins from scratch. Or not. Here are some of the resources I’ve been using for all the (free) plugins I have planned for you for this year and next. These resources range in target from beginner to advanced WordPress user. (I’ll post resources for other blog platforms at a later date.)
Devlounge has a great post, Customizing WordPress: Advanced, which as the title implies, is for the advanced WordPress user. This article is not so much about improving your theme, per se, but what information is being displayed on your pages. There are other articles on the site - all worth reading. The article in question does require you to understand some PHP programming.
If you need something a bit less advanced, the WordPress Codex has The Loop In Action. It amounts to a very introductory article on how to use the WordPress main “Loop”. The loop is how you retrieve recent posts and display them via your theme template. In other words, if you ever want to create your own theme, you need to understand the loop. The PHP coding is light; it mostly uses WordPress function calls, which are explained.
Liz also has a link at Successful Blog to Cre8d-Design’s Blog Design 101 - Creating Your Own WordPress Theme. The latter post has some tips I(and links to other articles) on how you can adapt the default WordPress theme to your own design.
Or if you don’t have the time, patience, or skills to create your own theme, Liz has a link to Emily Robbins’ list of links to 875 free Wordpress themes. [Emily’s list of links is actually now to 960+ themes, for both Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0.]
If you are even more daring and want to write your own WordPress plugin, to make your blog do new tricks, there are a number of tutorials available. You can start from the horse’s mouth with the WordPress tutorials Writing A Plugin and the Plugin API.
Randy Peterman’s Pordcast also has some tips in Writing a WordPress Plugin - Part I and Part II. However, this is aimed at WordPress 1.2, so you may need to use this with caution. A more recent tutorial, Customizing WordPress Plugins, is available at Dev Lounge.
If you do decide to design your own WordPress themes and write a few plugins, here are some suggestions, gleaned from my own recent experiences.
When designing themes, sketch out on paper all of the different layouts that you would like. Make sure that if your main page is going to look different or contain different information than your “post” (permalink”) and “page” pages, that you sketch out the differences. I can’t stress this enough.
The act of sketching on paper (not a computer) also stimulates creativity, and you may come up with several new designs that were lurking in your mind. Some of these may even be better than your original.
I have two small sketchbooks (3″x4″ and 4″x6″) that I carry around to record ideas. I’ve lost count, but I probably have a good 40-odd theme designs that I haven’t even had time yet to implement. Someday, when I have time, I’ll code them up and release them here.
My long experience as a programmer tells me that having a visual cue before hand goes a long way towards accomplishing your programming goals. And while designing a blog theme may be a design task, the actual implementation involves coding - in this case using PHP and WordPress function calls.
By the way, I like to use what are called either non-repro(duction) blue or non-photo blue pencils to do my initial theme sketches. When I’ve finalized my sketch, I’ll redo the important lines using pencil, pen+ink, and/or coloured ink as appropriate.
When creating plugins, make a list of information that the end user (you and any other blogger that downloads your plugin) will provide, and a list of the information that will be displayed in the WordPress control panel. Sketch out any (HTML) data entry forms required. Sketch out how information will be displayed. How will information be passed around? Do you need to store any information in the blog’s database? If so, write up a list of information to be stored, and get someone who knows mySQL coding to help you.
Planning is crucial to good programming, even if it’s just “light” coding for blog platforms. You’d be surprised to know how many so-called professional programmers do not plan properly and thus end up doubling or tripling their code development time. Real programmers do plan; real blog theme + plugin designers should too 
- Posted in : WordPress, Blog plugins, Themes, Information design
- Author :rdash
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Hi Code Professor,
Thanks sharing my blog with your readers and for letting me know you’re out here. Do you have a name?
smiles,
Liz
Successful Blog
Hi Liz: It’s me, Raj Dash
Addendum: My mistake. The Dev Lounge article “Customizing WordPress: Plugins” is not about writing your own plugin. It’s part of their Customizing WordPress series, but its about some of the plugins they like to use as part of customizing their themes.
That’s an aspect I did not touch upon in the above post, and a thoroughly legitimate way to tweak an existing theme. In fact, that’s what I did with the theme you see on this blog (as of this writing). I took the great Regulus theme by Binary Moon and tweaked it.
Something to consider when you modify existing themes: I didn’t want to give my version of Regulus a new name and claim that it was my own theme, as is implied in the footer of this page. However, because of the way WordPress themes must be written, I could not keep both the original theme and my version in my WordPress themes directory unless I made the changes.
Hi Raj!
I had no idea this was you! it’s great to see you. Gosh now I feel even more speiial.
Liz
I am looking for a wordpress template (or any other blog engine) which can serve my purpose to publish auto news. Can you recommend me any good source for such news templates? I liked DGNews type interface, but it had several bugs, so I discontinued using it. Thanks for your inputs.
Hi Japanese Car Pro. I’m sorry, but my email system didn’t let me know you’d commented. Sorry for the delay in responding.
You don’t really say what features you’re looking for. But if you want some variety, check out oswd.org, which has free general templates that you can adapt to any platform. You’ll need to do a bit of coding. I also visit Web Tools Collection regularly, as they have a lot of links for Wordpress themes and plugins. You might find something at either site.