I was disappointed with this book (Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes). I picked it up recently when on holidays, for a read on the flight home, ahead of a web design project I had ahead of me. It was a hasty decision in highinsight. After a two-minute glance, I saw that it was based on WordPress 3 and it mentioned some keywords on taxonomies and other new features, however it didn’t deliver once I started to read it fully.
The Main Downsides in my opinion were:
- No information on making a totally new theme from scratch (what I acually wanted)
- Only covered making a child theme (based on another existing theme)
- Focused too much on using the “Thematic Theme” as a framework to build upon.
- Lacked depth in discussing the Template Hierarchy.
Pros to the book were:
- Some useful code and information on widgets (however again, it was based on the thematic theme)
- Information on hooks and filters I didn’t know previously.
- Some inspirational images of site designs (not what I was looking for).
It looks like I’ll have to go back over my original reference for creating a new wordpress theme. Link: http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/ I can’t recommend this series of articles enough. They really go through and explain creating a wordpress theme from the ground up. And anyways, most people who build static websites with xhtml, css and php will have no bother creating all the elements required for a wordpress theme. First principles first!