Starting Monday January 7, 2008 I plan to start a series on WordPress Theme Design.  In this series we'll start with a completely blank slate and build up to a working WordPress theme that can be quickly and easily made to fit your needs.

As a model we'll be using the hackingWordPress theme (which is still undergoing some basic adjustments) but we'll be starting completely from scratch.  The goal of this project is to cover some basic HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript in a manner that lets new WordPress users and Theme Designers get started with the four basic pieces of web programming.

We'll be starting from a completely blank slate - just a handful of empty PHP files and a fresh WordPress install to treat as a Sandbox.

Over the course of the next few days, in preparation, I'll feature a few items which I find essential parts of my WordPress Toolbox.  If you're interested in following this project please stick around and let us know if there's anything special you want to cover.

The Tentative Schedule for this project is as follows:

  • Sunday: Assembling our Toolbox and prepping our WordPress Sandbox
  • Monday: Basic Blank theme creation - Essential HTML and PHP only
  • Tuesday: Using CSS to divide sections of the page
  • Wednesday: Creating and populating the Sidebar
  • Thursday: Creating and populating the Content Section
  • Friday: Creating and Populating the Header and Footer
  • Saturday: Using CSS to Color the Page and add background images

Right now this is a tentative Schedule.  Hopefully we can add to it rather than subtract.  Again if you have any special requests please feel free to include them here.