There are several resources out there for anyone to reference on how to create a WordPress Theme from scratch, including my favorite; How To Create a WordPress Theme: The Ultimate WordPress Theme Tutorial. This is the article I first read really to learn the process from the ground up, so kudos to Ian Stewart for doing such a thorough job of explaining the specifics. That said, while the code in this tutorial is the basis of my blog theme, I pretty much poured through every single line and completely changed it to suit my needs.
One thing is worth mentioning here; I did spend a lot of time looking at “theme frameworks”, including the one referenced in the above article. But in the end, I’m not really comfortable with trusting someone else’s work, or worse, using it and not understanding it. I’ve really decided to understand from top to bottom how to custom theme WordPress, and again, Ian’s article so far is my favorite. It takes you through the entire process, and even gives a link to the code to download. While it may not be written for WordPress 3+ and the new theming features, for what I needed to do here it was perfect. Perhaps Ian will update it with support for the new features soon. Continue reading