A Few Prodigious Options for WordPress Themes Development
If you are enthusiastic to build WordPress themes or if you want to create a system with more efficiency and robustness, then settle on with an easy approach. In the following content, you will learn how WordPress themes work and some options to develop them along with tips.
How exactly WordPress theme works?
WordPress websites drive a website and determine its constituents, behavior and appearance. You can use a theme more than once as they seized in database. This can be done if you have downloaded themes from WordPress’ theme repository. Additionally, a theme is abided with enormous template files that are stored in theme folder. You can facilely find it in wp-content/themes while installing WordPress. Two necessary files are always included: index.php and style.css.
In fact, most of the themes inherit a few additional files discussed as follows:
- header.php
- footer.php
- sidebar.php
- functions.php
- single.php
- page.php
- single.php
- index.php
- archive.php
- category.php and many more…..
Now, you have known that how WordPress theme works, so it has become a piece of cake for you to know about the building process of website.
A few imperative points to ponder while developing a WordPress theme:
Before you advent to develop your theme, it is better to identify your constraints. They may be following:
Time:
Evaluate the total time required for learning and developing the WordPress theme.
Capability:
Pinpoint your command over PHP, CSS and working of themes. Figure out that how much you need to work upon for improving all these skills.
Repetition:
Your approach needs to allow for the code for reusability, if you are musing yourself for developing similar themes for numerous times.
Budget:
You need to peg out whether you can afford to buy a premium theme or a framework. Moreover, this is also associated with the time factor.
Future-proofing:
You have to evaluate the future possibilities for your website. The possibilities can be regarding updating the website, involvement of other developers on website. Your approach has to be very robust.
Your options for theme development:
There are a few options which are available for developing your theme(s). Just roll up your sleeves and start coding will be worthwhile before you start investigating on them. You need to pick the right approach to get the better theme. You can use the more robust code too so as to minimize the amount of revisions. The options which you can adopt are:
From a scratch, start developing themes:
If you have an adequate knowledge of WordPress theme, then you may get a good command. It will be more appropriate, if you are importing HTML from an existing website which is to be upgraded to WordPress without any changes.
Edit an existing theme:
This is the primitive approach used by most of the beginners. They delve into style sheet and make edits to the website as per their opinion.
Utilize a theme customizer to yank an existing theme:
The theme customizer was introduced with WordPress 3.4. It provides an option to customize a theme without the use of any code and by using a WYSIWYG interface. You can use it to make the changes into images, colors, titles and layout too.
Develop a child theme to apply changes to an existing theme:
This approach is much familiar to make the editing to an existing theme and is also safer to use. It consist the steps of creating a new theme which is defined as a child of existing theme.
Develop your parent theme to make modifications to existing theme:
This includes the building of a set of websites for multiple companies and clients. Moreover, this is an option when you develop a parent theme and setting up the child themes for website.
Make use of theme framework:
Numerous of theme frameworks exists which can be used as a kind of parent theme along with more functionalities. In some cases, fancy layout and styling changes can be made without writing any line of code.
Amazing free WordPress frameworks to develop themes:
Wonderflux:
This is based on a lithe grid system. It offers options for altering layouts and styles without writing any code. It includes lots of widget areas and hooks too.
Theme hybrid:
It is comprised of myriad of hooks and widget areas which aids in customizing the themes. There are also some child themes. The framework and included child themes are absolutely free.
Thematic:
It is developed by Automattic which develops WordPress on its own. There are number of hooks, widget areas and filters too.
Carrington:
Among all the free frameworks, this is the most established and it owns a number of child themes too.
This is how you can swiftly develop customized WordPress themes. Apparently, you can have a WordPress theme as per your budget, if you earn a good command over WordPress theme development.
“Jason Roiz is associated with OSSMedia Ltd, a leading WordPress web development company providing industry best WordPress programmers For custom WordPress development services to its clients globally.”
