WordPress Themes In Depth

Super stoked to announce my new book, WordPress Themes In Depth! It covers the entire process of setting up, development, distribution, and everything in between.

WordPress Themes In Depth is literally overflowing with over 450 pages of in-depth theme-building action. And it includes example themes and lots of project demos. If you want to develop, customize, and even sell your own awesome WordPress themes, you’re gonna benefit greatly from this book.

WordPress Themes In Depth

Build your own WordPress themes!

For most of this year, I have been focused heavily on WordPress theme development, pouring every ounce of knowledge, experience, and inspiration into this book. It’s filled with practical information and is just the right balance of theory, application, and technique. The book includes lots of ready-to-go code snippets, tutorials, tricks, and tips. It’s basically a hands-on field guide for intermediate-level users who want to understand how themes work and build their own incredible WordPress themes.

The book goes in-depth on the following topics:

• Setting up for theme development
• WordPress theme fundamentals
• Theme anatomy and the WP Theme Template
• In-depth coverage of the WordPress Loop
• Complete chapter on customizing themes
• Theme development according to the WP API
• Security, optimization & testing
• Front-end techniques
• How to share and sell your own themes
• Two complete, step-by-step theme walkthroughs
• Advanced tour of the premium 2020 theme

The book covers all of the amazing things that WordPress can do, like Theme Features, Custom Fields, Meta Boxes, Widgets, Theme Options, Theme Customizer, Actions & Filters, Custom Taxonomies, Custom Post Types, and much, much more. To get a better idea of all that this book contains, check out the official Demo:

WP Themes In Depth – DEMO

Bundled themes

WordPress Themes In Depth includes five themes and over 20 project/code demos. Exclusive themes include the following:

• Simplest Theme
• DIY Theme (starter theme)
• General Theme
• shapeSpace (starter theme)
• Tao of WordPress theme
• 2020 (full-featured premium theme)

The book provides complete step-by-step tutorials for building the Simplest Theme, DIY Theme, and General Theme, and also features an in-depth walkthrough of the 2020 theme. You can see 2020 in action by visiting the book’s homepage. Throughout the book, these bundled themes are referred to as concrete examples to help facilitate learning.

Project demos

The bundled Demos are plug-n-play examples of techniques covered in the book, including the following:

• Custom fonts (via Google)
• Custom fonts (direct CSS3 method)
• PHP diagnostics
• Mobile/responsive sticky dropdown menu
• Full-size background image
• Full-size background video
• Lightbox functionality
• @media queries
• Random images via JavaScript
• Random images via jQuery
• Dynamic scroll-to-top link
• Fixed-width content slider
• Full-width content slider
• Video slider
• Social media buttons
• Theme Customizer
• Theme Options – Basic
• Theme Options – Tabbed
• Theme Options – Paged
• Toggle anything with jQuery

The book goes through each of these front-end techniques step-by-step, using the demos as plug-n-play examples so you can “see” how it works while following along. And to help tie everything together, many of these techniques are included in the 2020 theme. Triple win :)

Get WordPress Themes In Depth »

About the author

Jeff Starr is a 13-year WordPress veteran who loves to help people learn how to succeed with WordPress. He develops a small army of free WordPress plugins and themes, and has written four web-dev books, including Digging Into WordPress and The Tao of WordPress. You can find more of Jeff’s tutorials at Perishable Press, WP-Mix, Lynda.com, and elsewhere.

Loaded with content

WordPress Themes In Depth is a beautifully designed book that contains over 450 finely crafted pages with clean layout and easy-to-read typography. Every page is meticulously designed in full color and 100% focused on WordPress theme development. Here are some of the book’s best features:

• Full color
• Hyperlinked
• Searchable PDF format
• Bundled themes & demos
• Lots of copy/paste code samples
• Helpful diagrams & tables
• Concise & easy-to-read
• 12 chapters / 450 pages
• 300+ external resources
• At-a-glance notes
• Many tips & tricks

In addition to the Demo, here are some screenshots to give you a better idea of what’s inside the book:

WP Themes In Depth – Screenshots

You can also check out more screenshots at Perishable Press.

Get the book!

WordPress Themes In Depth brings it all together in a complete and focused guide that shows you how to master the art of WordPress theme development. One-time purchase gets you the eBook (digital/PDF format), all bonus content, and free lifetime updates!

Get WordPress Themes In Depth »

* Sorry, printed copies sold out

Combo Deals

Combo deals are available to save big with my other books, The Tao of WordPress, Digging into WordPress and .htaccess made easy. Various bundles are available to save some $$$, visit Perishable Press Books to learn more.