How To Make A free Wordpress Theme

Creating a WordPress theme from scratch is not hard. I’ll hold your hand through it.

Tutorials on this topic have been written before and the WordPress website also has guides for you to follow. But are those tutorials and guides really helpful to you when you don’t understand the lingo? Even I got lost while reading the WordPress guides.

Tools – Before we get started tomorrow, you’ll need:

• WordPress installed on your computer. Follow the instructions on Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP. If you can’t install WordPress on your computer for whatever reason, no worries, just make a dummy WordPress install on your website.
• Notepad or other text editors. I use Notepad.
• SmartFTP – If you’ll be testing your theme online, I’d suggest that you download and install SmartFTP or another FTP program to upload your theme files.
• Bookmark XHTML Validator and CSS Validator. You’ll need those tools to validate your theme. They also come in handy when you need to spot and fix errors.

Complete Lessons Listing

1.    Intro
2.    Template Files and Templates
3.    Starting Index.php
4.    Header Template
4.    b Header Template Continues
5.    The Loop
5.    b The Content
5.    c Postmetadata
5.    d Else, Post ID, Link Title
5.    e Posts Nav Link
6.    Sidebar (and Categories)
6.    b Page-Link Listing (wp_list_pages)
6.    c Get Archives and Links
6.    d Search Form and Calendar
6.    e Widgetizing Sidebar
7.    Footer
8.    How to Validate
9.    Style.css and CSS Intro
10.  hex Codes and Styling Links
11.   Widths and Floats
12.  Post Formatting and Miscellaneous
13.  Styling Sidebar
14.  Footer and Dividing Index
15.  Sub-template Files
16.  Comments Template