Stefan Mischook (of the KillerPHP.com site) has posted a new video tutorial about creating WordPress themes:
I just released a new video course on how to create a Wordpress theme/template from scratch. In these 12 videos, we will take someone with some beginner HTML and CSS skills through the steps needed to build a WordPress template from scratch. The videos use only a collection of freely downloadable tools that are available on Windows and Mac.
The full series will cost about $20 USD for a download or $30 USD to have the DVD shipped out to you. The videos focus on different parts of the process like making top-level navigation, setting up content areas and and creation of a custom homepage.
The NETTUTS site has posted the second part of their series looking at the creation of a custom WordPress template. This time they focus on expanding on the previous version, adding additional parts to the theme.
It's time for the good stuff now. We'll be adding the comments system, a sidebar with widgets and an archive for all the old posts. This will cover all that you need for a simple but well functioning WordPress theme, and hopefully you be able to apply this to all sorts of theming projects.
The give the code to create the sidebar (in their instance, an image from Flickr), handling the comments for each post and make the "archive" section to get to some of the older posts.
A while back the PHPClasses.org website announced that it would be changing its look a bit and allowing visitors to set up and configure their own look and feel as they chose. The editor to make these changes has finally been released and is ready for use.
The site is launching an editor that allows designs to propose new site design themes. This is the initial beta version of the site design editor, but it already allows any designer to try different presentation designs.
You can access the editor from here and it'll require a login to get in (to create your own custom layout). The system uses simple tag-based templating to wrap the content of the site in your look/feel of choice. You can even try it out on different sized resolutions to give you an idea of the template's flexibility.
PHPBuilder.com has posted an article from Ian Gilfillan about one of the more popular PHP-based wikis out there, phpWiki.
This month it's time to look at another of those PHP applications I find useful on a daily basis. I like to use "wikis" for documentation for many of the projects I work on. [...] In this article we will look at PhpWiki, and we'll show you how to configure and use it with your own projects!
Ian includes a little history of the application along with the installation and configuration instructions to get you started. There's even a section there at the end talking about templates, wiki styles and links to other resources to get you up to speed.
The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a series they've worked up to show bloggers out there running WordPress how to create a custom theme from scratch:
In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.
Here's the list so far:
Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
The Sanisoft blog has a quick post covering the theming of a CakePHP application (via the functionality in the core of the framework).
Despite this there are continued request for information on how to use this functionality on the list and even googling for cakephp + theme does not really return anything definitive. Once you have figured out how to use theming, adding new themes is errr... ummm... a piece of cake (sheesh talk about cliches!).
They break down the use of themes into a few simple steps - adding the property to the controller, setting the application's theme and install the theme's files to the correct locations.
Evan Sims has posted some of his first impressions on the latest version of one of the most popular pieces of PHP blogging software on the web - WordPress 2.3.
So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited Wordpress v2.3was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags.
He spends a bit explaining what these tags are and what they're useful for before getting into the actual experience with the new update. He talks about issues he came across (updating/replacing plugins with ones of the new version) and the updates he needed to make to his theme to allow for his customizations to still work as planned.
Cal Evans managed to sit down and talk with Marco Tabini of php|architect magazine for a few minutes to talk about their upcoming conference, php|tek - specifically the theme, "PHP::innovate()".
Last week, Marco Tabini, publisher of php|architect and all around nice guy, posted the "Call For Papers" for php|tek 2007. [...] Since I couldn't find my "marketing speak to English" dictionary, I decided to call Marco and see if he could translate it for me manually.
Cal asks him what the theme means and what it means to those proposing sessions and for those that will be making the trip to Chicago this year in May. Marco's answers cover the two-layer intention behind the theme and the flexibility that it brings. They have their ideas on what it suggests, but it could just as well mean many things to many different people. The intent is to represent how PHP has evolved and that it's really become a mature, innovative language to work with.
In this new article (Part 1) from Leon Kilat on the Cybercafe Experiments, he takes a look at how to use a popular web site development tool, Dreamweaver, to modify WordPress templates.
WordPress, like most PHP-MySQL CMS, use template files to control the appearance of websites. The webpage is assembled from several PHP files controlling specific aspects of the site like the header, sidebar, main content and footer.
To use Dreamweaver to edit or customize WordPress themes, you need to combine these different PHP files into one page so that you can immediately view, while editing the codes, how the page would appear.
He opts to go with a template named Zimpleza for simplicity's sake, and gets right into it. He steps through the process you'll need to prepare the environment, including pulling over the code and HTML from the current template files into Dreamweaver. Then, remove the PHP code and insert dummy content to get a better idea of how it will be laid out.
This is just a start - part two, focusing on creation (versus just modification) of a new WordPress theme.
The templating system in Drupal, a popular PHP-based content management system, is powerful and Nick Lewis wants everyone to know it. In his latest post, he starts off a series looking to help developers harness this power in their own sites.
This introduction provides the reader with details on a few different topics - making a custom template for the user login form, pass an "editable node" into said form, alter the values in it, and make the page easily accessible for the template file.
Being a tutorial, he steps you through every bit of the way, complete with code and explainations (and screenshots) to make the lesson easier. You'll need to know some PHP before getting into this - it's more than just a simple HTML template change.
