Most WordPress users do not understand the difference between the customization of an existing WordPress theme and the creation of a custom WordPress theme design. And why should they? They’re users focused on running their business and not on the jargon of WordPress design. Each week we run into this area of confusion and each week I feel the frustration from users trying to maneuver through the maze of premium WordPress themes, graphic designers, programmers, and WordPress ... Read More
Theme Customizations
PHP Basics
So far in this series we've talked about some tools and best practices, HTML and its new big brother HTML5 as well as an overview of how to work with CSS. In this post we are going to take a look at PHP basics. Like so many things in the internet world, PHP is an acronym. It stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor." (I know. It makes no sense that the first P in PHP stands for, um, PHP. But there you go.) PHP is the primary programming language WordPress is built on. That means it is also ... Read More
Customizing Image Elements in WordPress
When it comes to customizing WordPress themes I generally have an easier time of it changing CSS or tweaking the PHP code than I do modifying image elements of the theme. That's probably because I'm not a graphic designer. Fortunately you don't have to be a graphic designer to be able to customize the image elements of your Genesis themes. If that was a requirement I'd be sunk. What Are Image Elements? What do we mean by image elements? These are the portions of your theme that are ... Read More
Workflow for Customizing Genesis Themes
WordPress is an incredibly powerful platform that will empower you with the potential to reach the entire world with whatever you have to say. Even though WordPress combines relatively simplicity with incredible power and potential doing things like customizing Genesis themes can be a little intimidating if you're just getting started, or if you're just getting started tinkering "under the hood." Fortunately we can take some of the mystery out of it and help you avoid some of the most common ... Read More
23 Tools for Customizing WordPress Themes
There are tons of tools that can help simplify the process of customizing WordPress themes. In fact, the tools are far better than they were just a few short years ago. If you are kicking around the possibilities of starting to customize themes then this list I've put together will save you some headaches. Hopefully you will be able to avoid some of hassles that I went through over the years. These days I work exclusively on Mac's. In fact, I made the decision when I got to the point where ... Read More
The Anatomy of a Child Theme
When it comes to WordPress theme customization there are two main approaches. Traditionally, because WordPress is open source you'd just make your edits directly to the theme itself. Very early on the WordPress core developers added the ability to use a child theme. A child theme inherits all of the templates and functionality of the parent theme while allowing you to modify the parent theme output because the child theme files supersede the parent theme files. Advantages of Using Child ... Read More
Best Practices for Genesis Theme Customization
There is so much to cover when it comes to Genesis theme customization, that I've mapped out an entire series of posts to throughly cover it. I'm hoping this series will help people get a basic understanding of what it takes to start customizing their own WordPress sites and have the confidence to get started. While my specific examples will be aimed at the Genesis theme framework, most of what I share will have general application as well and can be used on most WordPress websites. Here ... Read More
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