1. Using Custom Taxonomies to Create a Movie Database

Custom taxonomies in WordPress are similar to tags and categories, but they provide almost endless possibilities. In this tutorial Justin Tadlock shows a practical use for custom taxonomies while working on a movie database website. He shows how to set up custom taxonomies for actor, director, genre, producer, studio, and writer. This will make it easier for visitors to navigate the site as they can click on the actors name and see all of his/her movies. Justin also wrote an introductory post to Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8.

You can also find more about custom taxonomies in Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr’s new book, Digging into WordPress, which I highly recommend.

2. Automatic WordPress Thumbnail Without Custom Field

This tutorial from Pro Blog Design shows how to use DarrenHoyt’s Tim Thumb script and the theme’s functions.php file to automatically grab and re-size the first image used in the post.

3. Design a Client Development Site with Wordpress MU

Another tutorial from Pro Blog Design. This one shows how WordPress theme designers and developers can save themselves some time and improve the process of developing themes for clients. It uses WordPress MU to be able to work on multiple themes with various clients at the same time.

4. Create Custom Single Post Template for Specific Posts or Sections in WordPress

WP Beginner shows how to create a custom single post template for each specific post, specific author, or a specific category. For designers or bloggers who want to use a number of different styles for their posts, this is a good option.

5. Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

Spencer from Function wrote a great tutorial that shows how you can create custom write panels in your WordPress themes. An example use for this would be post thumbnails without a custom field, but there are plenty of other ways that you could use this to improve your themes. Spencer has also written a follow up to the orginal article where he makes some improvements the to code being used.

6. Using Action Hooks in Child Themes and Using Filter Hooks in Child Themes

These two posts from Ian Stewart will help you to learn more about using child themes and customizations. Using the information here you can modify parent themes without impairing your ability to upgrade when a new version of the theme is released.

7. How to Make a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme

Cats Who Code has a nice tutorial that shows how theme designers can create a simple options panel that allows users to make some modifications to the theme. Control panels can make themes more user-friendly and reduce the need to edit theme code. Starscape also has a tutorial for creating a settings page.

8. How to Integrate Pagination in Your WordPress Theme

Pagination is a little more user-friendly than the default “next” and “previous” links. The WP Page Navi plugin is the most popular option, but this post from Cats Who Code shows how you can integrate it directly into the theme.

9. How to Show Related Posts Without a Plugin

Plugins are commonly used to display a list of related posts at the end of a blog post. This post at WP Recipes shows the code for getting a list of related posts without the use of a plugin.

10. Display Thumbnails for Related Posts in WordPress

Still on the subject of related posts, Build Internet has a tutorial for creating a better-looking related post list that included thumbnails. It’s a customization of the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

On this post we feature 10 exceptionally useful wordpress resources that might be a good help for your wordpress porject!

Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides:

1. Complete WordPress Theme Guide
Nick La of Web Designer Wall put together a three-part series to help those who want to learn more about WordPress theme development. The three parts are: installing WordPress locally, building a custom WordPress theme, and moving and exporting WordPress.

2.WordPress Theme Development Checklist
This PDF checklist is helpful to make sure that you are not forgetting any steps during theme development. The checklist will help you to know what you have done and what still needs to be completed

Frameworks:

3. Hybrid Theme Framework
The Hybrid theme framework, by Justin Tadlock, has also been created with child themes in mind. It includes 13 page templates for various purposes, 15+ plugins supported within the theme, breadcrumbs, and tutorials to help you get started.

4. Thematic
Thematic is a very popular WordPress theme framework created by Ian Stewart. This framework can be used as-is, or is excellent for using with child themes. In fact, a number of child themes for Thematic are available for free or as premium themes, including the free gallery theme distributed by Smashing Magazine.

Testing WordPress Themes:

5. Using XAMPP for Local WordPress Theme Development
Jacob Gube of Six Revisions shows how to set up a local environment for theme development. This is a detailed tutorial that may be able to save you a lot of time and make your theme development much quicker and easier.

6. How to Set Up a Killer WordPress Testing Environment Locally
NETTUTS also has a tutorial for setting up a local testing environment. If you are designing and developing many WordPress themes you will want to check out one of these two tutorials.

Dummy Content:

7. WP XML Test Data Import
When developing themes one of the biggest frustrations can be the lack on content on a new installation of WordPress. Self Conclusion has put together an XML file with several posts and pages of dummy content with tags, categories, comments, links, lists, and everything you will need to test a theme. You can easily download this file and import it into WordPress to save the time of adding your own dummy content.

8. WordPress Test Post Pack
Think Design Blog also has a pack of dummy content that can be downloaded and imported into WordPress.

Coding Services:

9. WPCoder
If you are a WordPress designer and you would like to save some time in development of the theme, WPCoder is a group of developers that specialize in taking your designs in PSD format and coding them into WordPress themes.

10. PSD to WP
PSD to WP is another coding service similar to WPCoder.