WordPress is one of the most successful blogging and content management tools to have emerged out of the open source movement. One of the things that makes WordPress so successful is the ease of extensibility and the well-established development environment. If you’ve ever wanted to build your own WordPress themes, but don’t know how to get started, this class is for you.

Register here

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Basic architecture of WordPress, including file structure, database structure and tables – and how the page rendering pipeline works.
• The structure of a theme, starting with a CSS file and then moving into templates for pages, posts, and categories
• Defining your site structure with widget areas / sidebars
• Letting your users customize with menus, headers, and page backgrounds in the WordPress dashboard
• Using Featured Images in your templates
•  Hooks and Filters
• Plugins vs. Themes
• Creating a basic plugin to supplement your theme

You should be prepared with basic knowledge of how HTML, CSS, and PHP work. If you don’t know the basics of how web applications work, this class may be over your head.

Your development environment: This can be either a local installation through something like MAMP or WAMP, or your own hosted server. Contact us at (510) 832-3401 if you need help getting this set up.

This class will run for 5 sessions on Wednesdays, from 3-5 PM, starting on January 16, 2013.