Blog Design Studio

WordPress as we all know is the most fantastic blogging software and is turning in a great CMS. There are number of themes and plug-ins available on the internet and as its popularity is growing, many more designers and programmers are jumping in WordPress Design & Development. There are various cheat sheets and presentations available that are pretty useful in WordPress design & plug-in development, so we thought of listing most useful of the lot over here -

1. The WordPress Help Sheet

This wonderful Help Sheet contains information for the people starting with WordPress design and development. It contains commonly used simple php snippets for template files, header files and some more useful stuff. The document was created by WPCandy along with Liquidcity. However, the download link on WPCandy wasn’t working, so I’ve uploaded it on Scribd.

2. Advance WP Help Sheet

After the simple WP Help Sheet, WPCandy released an advanced version of that cheat sheet. It’s aimed towards advanced developers and should be a helpful document for beginners as well. Again the document is not available on WPCandy – so you can download it over here.

3. WordPress Theme Development Check List

WPTOY has released the official WordPress theme development checklist as PDF and it can be downloaded from here. it covers checklists for stylesheets, browser compatibility, pages, validation of code, WordPress code & few blog elements.

4. WordPress Template Tag Reference Guide

DBS Interactive has released a template tag reference guide, which is basically a list of all the template tags found at WordPress Codex. It’s online and  can be accessed from the aforementioned link.

5. WP Plugin API & Theme Tags

Bueltge has released the WordPress plugin API & theme template tags in individual PDFs. They are commonly used tags and can be downloaded from here – the page is in German, although you can use latest version of Firefox or Chrome to translate them automatically, else use Google Translate.

6. Official WordPress Optimization Cheat Sheet

WordPress optimization cheat sheet is present on WordPress codex, that educates you about server optimization, improving performance of WordPress, offloading the server, caching and how to add multiple database servers. Overall, its a perfect guide for those who have high traffic websites.

WordPress Related Cheat Sheets

WordPress theme development needs the knowledge about CSS, Design, PHP, Javascripts and few others. WordPress is mainly used for blogs, so we thought of listing cheat sheets of those topics as well.

7. WordPress Blog Maintenance checklist

This checklist gives you the daily, weekly and monthly tasks to maintain the blog. I’m sure it’ll be very helpful for those who are unorganized and lazy enough to skip these small tasks.

8. jQuery Cheat Sheet

Jquery Cheat sheet lists commonly used functions of jQuery. It can be downloaded from here. Thanks to TripWireMagazine.

9. MySQL Cheat Sheet

Easily interact with MySQL using this cheat sheet. It listes mathematical expressions, Data types, MySQL functions in PHP etc. The sheet was released by AddedBytes and is a great reference for WordPress design and development.

10. Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

Seomoz has done it again. Its one of my favorite resource for learning about search engine optimization. They released web developer’s seo cheat sheet and is a useful reference for those who want to make themes SEO friendly while developing them.

11. RGB Color Codes

This handy cheat sheet lists 216 web safe colors that can be used while developing the WordPress themes. Of course, this will not be used by those who design using Adobe Photoshop or dreamweaver, but will be handy for those using good ol’ notepad++.

12 WordPress CSS Cheat Sheet

WordPress CSS Cheat sheet lists the basics of CSS that’ll be helpful in development of WordPress themes.

Some Kick Ass Presentations

13. WordPress Optimization

Joost De Valk gave the presentation at A4UExpo and has uploaded the presentation used at Slideshare. He gives 40 tips in this presentation and should be helpful for developers.

14. 101 Landing Page Optimization

It’s important for every designer to know about user interface and the practical use of it. Landing pages are pretty important for any website. Every WordPress designer should be aware of optimization tips of landing pages. Oli Gardner of Unbounce has created a presentation on optimization of landing pages and uploaded it on SlideShare. It’s a must read for every designer.

15. Securing WordPress

BlogSecurity.net has created the whitepaper to secure WordPress. It’s a fantastic whitepaper to learn more about security WordPress and things one should take care of at the time of development. Secure WordPress site will mean clients will be happy from you!

Well, these are some of the cheat sheets that we liked although there are lot of such information available on the web. Here are the links where you can find them easily -

1. Search Engine’s Big Daddy! – Google result for WordPress PDFs, so its just not some cheat sheets, it’ll be lot more than that.
2. SlideShare – Awesome Presentations on WordPress
3. Scribd – Documents on WordPress
4. Cheat Sheet database – we’ll you find cheat sheets not only WordPress but on various other topics.

I hope you found this article useful. Please share the love by posting it on Facebook or Twitter or whatever service your like.