So, you’ve been messing about with websites for a little while now, and you’ve decided to take the plunge and learn how to design themes for WordPress. Perhaps you’re a blogger yourself, and you want to take the next step by redesigning your site, or perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a strong market for ready-made WordPress themes and you want to get in on the ground floor, so to speak. You’re probably itching to start building your first WordPress theme, but before we jump in, it’s a good idea to think about why we’re here, and how we arrived. This chapter will give you a bit of background on WordPress in general and WordPress themes in particular.
In the following two chapters Brandon will take you through the process of planning and designing your theme; then Raena will take over and introduce you to the code behind WordPress themes and the Thematic framework, which will make your life as a developer much more enjoyable. After that, Allan will take you through the slightly more advanced topics of widgets and custom theme options; and finally, it’s me again, Jeffrey, back to provide some insight into how to sell your themes and profit from them.
Here we go!
Many of you may be unaware that WordPress is based on a blogging platform with a modest adoption rate—a few thousand installations—built in mid-2001 and called b2. Michel Valdrighi, its developer, managed development for roughly two years before the platform’s users began to notice that he’d seemingly abandoned the project. Fortunately for thousands upon thousands of loyal WordPress users, one particular b2 fan was Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.
Thanks to the convenience of online archives, we can trace the inception of WordPress back to one single blog entry, made by Mullenweg on January 24th, 2003:
[…] My logging software [b2] hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.
What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree This date marks WordPress’s birthday—at least in hindsight! In that short two-paragraph posting, called “The Blogging Software Dilemma,” Matt sows the seed of an idea that will eventually turn into WordPress. Over the course of 2003, along with Mike Little, Matt did indeed fork b2 and prepare the first release of WordPress, which ultimately was announced on December 26th.
If we leap forward six years, WordPress has now been installed over 22 million times, easily making it the most popular blogging platform in the world. Due to its extensibility, literally thousands of plugins have been built on top of the framework, allowing for increased functionality, including the handling of sites like job boards and wikis. And, most importantly for us, thousands of themes have been developed to give WordPress nearly any look imaginable.
Matt has since formed Automattic—WordPress’s parent company—and has been named one of the 50 most important people on the Web by PC World.
WordPress is currently supported by roughly a dozen core developers, and a plethora of active contributors in the community, including the creator of b2, Michel Valdrighi.
Despite all that horn blowing, why choose WordPress over the array of other excellent blogging platforms and CMSes available around the Web, including Movable Type and Blogger? Surely they have an equal number of impressive stats to spout, right? Well, you might choose WordPress for a variety of reasons:
As with any technology choice, the decision to use WordPress ultimately comes down to personal preference
ence. But with all those reasons, and a platform that’s continually growing in popularity, it’s really more a question of, “Why wouldn’t you use WordPress?”
If you’re entirely new to WordPress, the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com and might be a bit confusing at first. The first site, wordpress.org, is the home of the free and open source WordPress software platform. If your intention is to develop custom themes and host the CMS on your own server, wordpress.org is the only option.
WordPress.com, meanwhile, is a commercial entity operated by Automattic, which provides hosted blogging using the WordPress platform. It’s free to use, though there are a number of premium features available for a fee.
Here are the pros and cons of each:
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