Until late 90’s, online publishing wasn’t as easy as it is in current times, it was the evolution of Blogger that started to make this space easier for common person who are technically challenged. Although, it were CMSes like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla & various other open source systems that upped the game by giving more power in the hands of publishers at much lower cost as the whole platform is completely free, the only cost involved is customization of the platform and the way content is displayed which is nothing if we compare the power and flexibility we get using these content management systems.
It was the evolution of blogging that brought many significant changes in the web ecosystem and one of them is that there are far more webmasters now and hundreds of them are becoming professional webmasters every day. I personally believe that its WordPress that has contributed significantly in this space. Its user friendly, has great documentation and has awesome community around it. WordPress is fast becoming the first choice for every publisher, people are shifting on it and this increase in demand is making web design companies adopt WordPress and one of the reason why we see so many companies offering premium WordPress templates and companies offering WordPress design services.
With that, we thought of coming up with a resourceful post that’ll help the new Web designer turned WordPress designers in making their lives easy -
Resources for Coding
WordPress Codex: What can be better than the official codex itself? The documentation itself is wonderful and that is one of the reason why developers were quick to adopt WordPress.
WP Engineer: WP Engineer has lots of posts with codes and lots of posts with tips that are surely going to help beginners. It’s a must bookmark blog for all those who want to learn coding in WordPress.
Cheat Sheets: Dainis Graveris has listed 23 extremely useful cheat sheets for programmers and WordPress designers. This is one resource that you will love to the core.
Tutorials for Developing WordPress themes: Vandelay design has posted a fantastic list of tutorials that help newbie’s in understanding WordPress theme designing.
Coda Clips: Coda is a text editor for web developers (mac only), it supports keeping small snippets for faster and quicker development. To support that, they started Coda Clips blog that features frequently used snippets and is regularly updated.
WordPress Mailing lists: WordPress official mailing list is the best place to keep yourself up to date with that is happening around WordPress and what are the new changes or requests made by the community. It’ll not only keep you up to date with the current status, it gives you the idea about what may be the next big feature of WordPress.
WordPress plugins to help WordPress Designers – We’ve featured 9 plugins for WordPress that will surely help all the beginner’s in quicker development of WordPress themes.
WordPress Theme Frameworks
A theme framework is the flexible foundation, that can be used to build WordPress themes faster and quicker, without worrying about coding various basic functionalities. Someone with prior experience in CSS would be able to quickly adapt to WordPress designing. We are listing some of the most popular theme frameworks over here.
Thematic – Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.’’
Theme Hybrid – Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. Like WordPress, this theme is completely free and open source. You can use it for your client work or for a blog about your grandchildren. It is continuously being developed and has a community growing around it.
WP Framework – WP Framework was created to serve as the starting point in WordPress theme development. It accomplishes this by providing you with commonly used functions and features that modern WordPress themes should have. So when you start a brand new WordPress project, using WP Framework you’ll already have the basic functionality set so you don’t have to worry about mundane task like creating the loop, or recreating all the standard template files.
Carrington – Carrington is a CMS theme framework for WordPress from Crowd Favorite, that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates.
WordPress Books for newbie WordPress designers
There are various books written for WordPress and many are yet to be published. There are some fantastic books for WordPress, although I would like to mention these books for those who seriously want to be WordPress designers.
- Rockable Press – How to be rockstar WordPress Designer is a fantastic e-book as it is focused on those who want to shift from regular web designing and want to become WordPress designers.
- Vladimir Prelovac (not an affiliate link) – Vladimir has created lots and useful and some of the most popular plugins for WordPress. He’s a great authority in WordPress plugin development. This book should be in arsenal of those who want to develop WordPress plugins.
I hope these resources will be useful for anyone who wants to be a pro WordPress Designer. If you know any more resources, then please point them to us and we’d be more than happy to include them here.
thats a great article!
I prefer, as a developer, create a site from scratch with my own resources, this way you have more control over what you can accomplish your website. But it is true that many companies already asked that developers have experience with such tools is a way to save time and labor.
It is a Very useful article, for who facing delima in choosing blogging platform.
with the latest release of Buddypress and wp-ecommerce, wordpress offers so much flexibility for developers as a platform. I use wordpress for all my sites because it can handle so much and easily modified.
Nice piece. I’ve been using the headway framework for a while and think I like it. It seems like everyday though I’m hearing of new frameworks coming out. That tells me that the WP design market is about to do some massive growth. In fact, if one just looks at the income that some of the top frameworks have produced then that’s probably enough right there to say that the WP framework design market has a rosy future.
very powerful article, please post more, waiting for more.