An Abstract (and brief) Look Into WP Theme Development

Introduction

This article is first and foremost written to give insight on what comprises a WordPress Theme. Though I will be touching on many things needed this is not intended to be a how to on theme development. It is more so an insider look at the processes involved and the code needed to achieve various functionalities within the themes themselves.

What We Will Be Covering

For this article, we will be using a theme I am currently developing as a case study. We will be covering the basics of the theme as well as some of the more advanced features such as custom shortcodes, custom post types and various functions used throughout the theme.

Theme Basics

First off, if you don’t want a primer into themes, please skip to the next section.

The following are the basic constants when developing WordPress Themes, the core items and methods to turn what otherwise would be plain static HTML into a dynamic template file in a WordPress Theme.

The most important thing to understand about WordPress Themes is that they are modular. When talking WordPress, that means that parts of the templates are broken down into modules that are called in template files rather than hard coding them into every file. So, what does that look like? Lets take this extremely basic example static HTML5 page and break it down into WordPress modules.