Smashing Wordpress Themes: Making Wordpress Beautiful - book review

One of the great strengths of using the Wordpress blogging platform to run a website is the amount of flexibility it offers when it comes to the look of the site.

As virtually all formating is handled by the site's 'theme', you can make big changes quickly just by installing a new template.

This book is aimed at people who want to know how templates work, either to edit existing templates or to create their own from scratch.

Coming from the design website Smashing Magazine, the book is as well-laid-out as we've come to expect. It's in full colour throughout and easy to read.

There is quite a lot of programming code listed in the book but this is all colour coded. This sort of coding is also done by many text-editing programs (such as the excellent Notepad++) and is a huge aid to making sense of code. You will need some experience with the languages used by Wordpress (HTML, CSS and PHP).

The book starts with an introduction to Wordpress and then goes into more depth as to how Themes work. It then explains how to make your own themes.

There is also help on installing Wordpress on a computer with a local webserver for testing. It's not a good idea to mess about with a live website so a local copy gives a safe place to experiment. There are instructions for doing this with Windows, Mac and Linux.

One great help is the ability to create child themes that are based on an existing theme but customised to exact requirements. This makes the process a little less daunting. Somehow no matter how simple template ideas appear to be, they always get more complicated as they are being made.

There are several chapters devoted to different kinds of templates with information on social media tools for Wordpress and an introduction to plugins.

Working with Wordpress themes can be an in-depth subject and this book is an excellent resource for people wanting to do just that.