10 useful resources for wordpress theme designers

Sep 4th, 2009 |  2 Comments | Twit this! |  delicious |  digg |

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We all know how wonderful wordpress is and one of the benefits of developing or designing for wordpress is the wordpress community,  support and help right on your fingertips, there are just so many quality resources available out there, these resources can save your time in your own development. But the problem is that there are so many resources available that sometimes it is difficult to find what you are looking for.

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.