WordPress has given a new height to website development. It has made it easy & interesting for all with its supreme themes & modern designs. It has hundreds of free & paid themes that offer easy web development to a mass audience. But if you’re a developer and want to dive deep into the world of WP designing & development, your next destination is WordPress Theme Development.
Books for WordPress Theme Development:
Books have always been the best friend of a learner. Although we’re living in a digital age, we believe that books are still your best guide to learn and excel in any subject. WP theme development is no different and you can be a Zero to Hero in WP theme development skills from the below books.
1. Building a WordPress Theme from Scratch:
This book is solely for beginners. It’s a 74 pages book whose motive is to introduce WordPress to common non-technical people. If you’re in a hurry to build a website from WP, it’s the perfect book to start learning your fundamentals. Its writing style is basic and features plain English that make it easy to read for all. It is a step-by-step guide to converting a design into a WP theme. However, this book is of no use if you’re already familiar with basics & want more technical exposure.
2. WordPress Theme Development:
This book covers a mass audience from beginners to technical professionals. You get a basic introduction, advanced theming design, local WP installation, and structuring and organizing a basic WP theme.
This book dives deep into the technical understanding of WP. It promotes no shortcuts and expects its readers to have the patience to learn everything slowly but in depth. Although this book is inclined toward the technical, a newbie can follow this easily. You will start with the basics of WP theming and learn PHP, custom theme widgets, Ajax forms, and code validation tools.
3. Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Theme:
The book starts slowly by introducing the history of WP and its motive during its early years. However, it gains pace as you get into the second chapter. You will be exposed to technical terms such as grids, different theme files, how widgets/plugins work, and how they contribute to one single webpage altogether.
Each chapter offers a source code & exercises to give you practical practice. You will get to know the major points of WordPress theming and build all new themes from scratch. Building a new theme on top of existing themes is also an option. Advanced technical kinds of stuff such as documentation, GPL licensing, and releasing your own theme are also given in the last chapters.
4. Building Web Apps with WordPress:
This is a heavy 450 pages book, slow to read but covers all things that you will need to understand the web apps on WP. WordPress is no longer a blogging platform but it offers higher functionality for businesses & personal branding. The authors have successfully explained native mobile apps, custom features for user roles, 3rd party PHP libraries, and data visualization.
This book is not for beginners but for professional WP developers who want to learn more technical kinds of stuff and create something unique and on top of all existing WordPress themes. You will learn several advanced things such as Custom News Site, a Social Network, A Reddit clone, or a Web Game Store.
5. WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook:
Plugins are web apps that enhance WP’s functionality multiple times. This cookbook gives you a direct approach to building such amazing WP plugins from scratch. The book features 80 unique recipes for building custom plugins. You will learn to add a customization panel to the dashboard, custom widgets building manual, queue JS libraries to a plugin, and much more.
As a cookbook, it covers all the custom post types & custom database tables in great detail. If you want advanced training on building a Premium WP theme with internal or external plugins, this book is your next stop.
Courses for WordPress Theme Development:
Several online companies are ready to share their expertise in WordPress Theming in their online courses. Both free and paid courses are available on different platforms that offer beginners to industry-level training modules. You will step-by-step learn all the strategies, hacks, tips & tricks from these online experts.
1. Designing for WordPress by Tutplus:
‘Designing for WordPress’ is a great course to get exposure to the designing world of WP. Designing is an essential part of the WP theme as you will need it for the beautification & enhanced functionality of your website.
This course will teach you the fundamentals of WordPress theme design. It explains what WordPress is and how you can structure it.
2. Building WordPress Themes with Bootstrap:
Once you’re exposed to the designing of WP themes, you now need to learn the building process. An open-source framework like Bootstrap is a good idea to start if you’re new to this. Bootstrap will give you a kickstart in developing responsive mobile webpages in your very first project.
‘Building WordPress Themes with Bootstrap’ teaches you to convert an HTML template into a WordPress theme. In midway, you will learn the development of WordPress themes as well as technical complex kinds of stuff such as custom widgets & queries.
3. Customizing WordPress with Child Themes:
Child WP theme inherits the coding & functionalities of its parent theme. You can make significant edits here and your parent theme will still be untouched. The modification here will not alter the functioning of the parent theme. This also helps to update the parent theme without losing the modifications.
The ‘Customizing WordPress with Child Themes’ course is a video series on how to create, manage, and grow your child theme from a parent theme. You can use this theme to customize your WP website for your desired purpose without worrying about loss of data.
Conclusion:
Learning WP theme development will open a whole new world of WP for you. You will start building custom widgets, popular web clones, game stores, and many more. But if you don’t know the right resources to look for it, you may get lost in the ocean of data.
Above we have discussed books and courses that are absolutely fine for beginners as well as professional WP designers. Go to them and start learning today.
