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WordPress WordPress Theme Development Finishing Your WordPress Theme WordPress Theme Development Next Steps

Camila N
Camila N
10,677 Points

Are we going to learn to create customizable and reusable wordpress themes?

I found the 'Bridge' theme and I was amazed. Here's the link to it: http://themeforest.net/item/bridge-creative-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/7315054 I know it's much more advanced that what I know how to do now, but I was wondering if there is going to be a course in the future teaching how to do customizable and reusable themes like that one (Or if anyones knows where to learn that).

Camila N
Camila N
10,677 Points

Thanks! I already did two commercial wordpress themes, one with woocommerce, for the agency I worked for. These were not reusable, I followed the design our customers gave to me, so they were kind of rigid.

Now I moved over to another company and they don't use Wordpress at all, and I realized I missed it. I wanted to get good at it, and learn to do reusable themes or more complete themes (the ones I did were not so complete and were done in a hurry). So I thought I should start one theme for practice. I started looking at designs of themes and I saw that one.

Andres, what you answered helped me a lot. I'm going to do that, but I'll start with a simple theme and build the reusable parts on top of it.

I think I'll start slow, maybe creating different templates as you said, and then learn about all the rest. I was intending to do a base/blank theme to have a starting point for all my future wordpress themes, so this helped a lot.

3 Answers

Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points

Hi Camila,

Are we going to learn to create customizable and reusable wordpress themes? Yes and No, I´ll explain..

Yes, you will get a strong foundation on how to build a wordpress theme and how to create templates for different pages, for instance, let´s say you want to have 10 different home pages, you will be able to make all of the pages.

To build a theme like that is not only page templates, you will need to know how to use Advance Custom fields (Explained in the Course), you also need to know how to use Redux framework and then use a Page builder such as Visual Composer..

If you don`t want to spend 100$ for a page builder you could do what the Avada creator did, they first began with a shortcode button in the TinyMCE that allowed you to create columns, insert images, etc...

As for the animations, you should have a strong foundation in animation with CSS3 or learn JavaScript and then Jquery.

The good think is that most of the things you need to learn or know can be found in here, to build a theme like that is not a walk in the park and it is time consuming when working alone.. My best advice is begin with a personal project, learn how to use Redux and Advance Custom Field, then build two more projects and finally JUMP to your final goal which is to build a theme like the one you shared.

Best of luck!

David Scanu
David Scanu
20,160 Points

Great answer. thanks a lot. Making such themes is a long journey !

Does anyone have great ressources to learn Redux framework ? I am having a hard time finding some good tutorials on the topic.

Andres Altuve
Andres Altuve
16,274 Points

Hi Camila,

If you want to get really good at build wordpress theme you should start with the basics, first learn PHP and then move on to the Wordpress Theme Development Track.

If you don´t know PHP, I suggest you to take the following courses:

PHP Basics

PHP Functions

Object-Oriented PHP Basics

I highly recommend you to get a good grasp on php so you don´t go on autopilot doing stuffs wihtout understanding whats going on.

Once you reach to Wordress Plugin Development stop there and learn JavaScript, as for the blank theme idea, I allways use underscores, this starter theme comes with all the files you need an a couple of functions in the functions.php... You do need to do some cleaning in the CSS if you plan to use Bootstrap.

If you don't need anything with too much custom functionality, you should look into WP Bakery: http://wpbakery.com/