Writing WordPress themes is easy

The secret’s out. WordPress is easy to use.

It really is. This may look complicated:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<h3><?php the_excerpt(); ?></h3>
<p class="byline"><?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?>. Written <span class="flourish">by</span> <?php the_author_firstname(); ?>.  <a href="#commentary">Read the commentary</a>.</p>

But it’s actually simple. And the point is that you’ll reuse it several times, without even having to know what F jS, Y means. And finding out what F jS, Y means is just a short google search away.

When I designed my first WordPress theme, I didn’t even know what PHP was. I built the theme by poking around the template files with Notepad++, until it looked OK.

I now know some PHP and, yes, it does make customising easier and development quicker, especially if I’m trying to bend WordPress into unlikely shapes.

What is difficult is creating plain old HTML and CSS that works, is readable and looks good. I design WordPress themes in two steps:

1. Produce a CSS/HTML mockup that doesn’t have any dynamic functionality (e.g. a comments form that works)
2. Convert the HTML to PHP template files

Now, step 2 sounds more complicated: the world and his dog can create static HTML pages, no? And generating a list of posts based on their tags is surely more difficult than wrapping a header in h2 tags and styling the output. Yet step 1 invariably takes longer, is more frustrating and requires more imagination than step 2.

Clients no doubt feel that they get best value for money from the work that goes into step 2, the WordPress magic. That’s not true—it doesn’t surprise me to hear that a top notch designer can knock up a basic, standard–issue theme in 90 minutes. Because just as writing good content is criminally undervalued (good content can redeem nearly all bad design, yet a javascript code monkey will earn twice as much as a good content editor) writing well-formed, imaginative HTML and CSS is a rare, precious skill.

Filed under: Miscellany, WordPress

Tagged: coding, content, design