WordPress Theme Development Tutorial Review.

I was having a hard time finding a WordPress theme for a travel blog I'm trying to get started. After trying several themes I decided the only way I'd get exactly what I want is if I attempted to create one myself. Hey, why not? I know HTML, CSS, I can get around JavaScript and have a basic understanding of PHP. I CAN DO THIS!

So over the last 4 or 5 days, I've hacked away at a WordPress Theme project non stop from the time I woke up till the time I went to sleep. I read a little info on the WordPress site, then watched a tutorial video to learn the basics and start messing around with front end WordPress development.

The first video I watched was just plain confusing. The instructor was all over the place. I watched about a half an hour and shut it off. I've had nothing but positive experiences with the Free Code Camp stuff so I decided to see if they had a tutorial. They did, I enjoyed it, and here is my review.

The Good!

As always, the content is quality.IMHO FreeCodeCamp is the best. The instructor is informative, knowledgeable, and explains most of what he's doing thoroughly. He explains a little about how a WordPress theme works and also explains each component that he builds. The video covered HTML, CSS(a lot of CSS), a little JavaScript, and the video even gives the viewer a crash course in PHP.

By the time the video was complete, I had a pretty good understanding of how theme development works. I was comfortable getting around the CMS (content management system) and had a general idea of how things worked. For the most part, I was really happy with the 4-hour video.

Overall, coding along with the 4-hour video took me a little over four days to complete. Most of that was spent debugging syntax errors. My fault of course! If something wasn't working right, I'd stop. Debug the issue, then move forward. Normally, I would just move on and return to it later, but there was just too much to cover, and I didn't want to get confused.

So the course is thorough, and I learned a lot.

The Bad

I'm not in the habit of poo pooing other people's hard work, and I won't start today. For the most part, I loved everything about this video. I did, however, find some of the coding to be a bit redundant. The instructor creates a class and ID and a div for almost every aspect of the site. The CSS file ended up being over 700 lines of code. I know this is common practice with WordPress, but I personally would have streamlined my CSS more. I tend to make classes that I can share over multiple aspects of my design. For almost every aspect of this design, the instructor creates a new div, an ID, and a class, styling each part of the project separately. By the end of it, it seemed a bit confusing and a little bit like overkill. I'm not judging, some people like designing like this. I'm a "less is more" kind of guy. Streamlined code IMHO is more manageable, easier to maintain, and gives us faster load times.

I ended up with 13 pages for a site with an about me page, a photography category, a blog, and a homepage. Again, I think this could have been streamlined a little more too. The guy was thorough and I'm grateful for what I learned. I guess now that I have a general understanding, I can create my own theme from scratch and see what's possible to streamline.

Final thoughts.

This is a great tutorial for someone new to WordPress theme creation. I think it's a great starting point for anyone that already knows their basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The simple introduction to PHP is enough info to get you through the video and accomplish what needs to be done.

If you've ever considered creating your own WordPress theme I'm comfortable saying this is a fantastic starting point!

By the end of the tutorial, I did have everything I needed to make a WordPress theme that was exactly what I was looking for. It was the perfect site for my needs. I have a blog section for my travel posts, a photography section to load some of my images from the road. There is an about me page, and a small section at the bottom of the page that will allow me to promote my web design business. Totally stoked, and totally happy. Success!

I'm spending the next day or two getting the basic changes finished up then uploading version 1.0.0 to my hosting service worts and all. This should prove to be a great starting point for my WordPress theme development. I'm going to play around and experiment with this theme as I use it. I'm also already in the process of working on a theme from scratch now that I know the basics.

If you've ever considered WordPress theme development, this tutorial is a great starting point. I'll post a link to the final project over the weekend. Thanks for reading and code on!