Creating WordPress theme from scratch tutorial

This post is more a note to myself to remember this excellent set of tutorials by Brad Schiff. He  shows the development of a WordPress theme from scratch. Although hardly a complete theme, what he creates in the tutorial is a working theme and during the process, he explains many of the fundamental programming blocks like The Loop, which is the heart of creating a post.

I’m trying to delve deeper into WordPress, which is really a fascinating community, blogging tool and exemplar of people working together. I eventually want to modify a simple theme like _S and turn it into a Starfleet theme to be used in one of my many non-money making projects. Even if that never happens, it’s still fun to explore and use what I learn from these tutorials to customize the themes I use in web development.

I usually limit myself to customizing the css of a theme, but I’ve had occasion to modify a php file, sometimes less than successfully.

PS Brad is an energetic, personable and talented teacher. He’s also an excellent example, I think of vocal fry, which I would never have even noticed if I hadn’t heard a segment of This American Life about vocal fry. I really enjoyed listening to Brad’s tutorial and he came across as very intelligent, if a little relentlessly upbeat. He relentlessly used my friend Steffen Andrew’s favorite motivational tool — “Let’s get started!” And the weird thing is that all these mannerisms, the vocal fry and the positive attitude really work, whereas if you well dwell on them:

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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