Meetup Notes: An Intro To Theme Development

Last night, I had the chance to talk to my local WordPress Developer meetup group on an Introduction To WordPress Theme Development.

From my experience, one of the challenges of speaking at meetups is that you never know where your audience is in terms of their skill level. Sure, you can host a developer group, blogger group, designer group, or whatever, but the truth is that people are going to show up eager to learn, but will do so at a varying degree of skill level.

To that end, I geared my presentation towards those who are looking to development themes following the best practices, and from the ground up. That is, I hoped to level set exactly what a WordPress theme is, what goes into creating one, and how to think about it from a developer’s perspective.

After all, this lays a foundation off of which future meetups and discussions can build on the more involved aspects of WordPress theme development.

Presentation Slides

[slideshare id=16694276&doc=anintroductiontowordpressthemedevelopment-130222064731-phpapp02]

Discussion

One of my favorite parts of participating in meetup groups is the discussion that typically happens after a presentation or talk is given. In last night’s meetup, we talked about the following:

• Post Formats and how to approach theme in theme development
• Whether or not a feature should be built into the theme or built as a plugin
• Hacking a theme, starter themes, building from the ground up, and child themes
• __s Start Theme
• The Shortcode API

Resources

For those who attended and/or are interested in the resources we discussed, here’s everything that was presented during the talk:

• Theme Development at The WordPress Codex
• The WordPress Settings Sandbox example theme
• WPTuts+ and Smashing WordPress

Remember that if you’re participating in a local meetup and are looking for somewhere to share your notes, consider submitting a post here to WP Daily.

We’re happy to have others in our community contribute what they are doing in their local community to help evangelize and educate about WordPress. You can learn more about our thoughts on this here.