WordPress Theme Toolkit
I am working on creating my own, custom theme, for this site. I know I’ve said this before, but this time I really mean it. In addition to my desire to create my own look here I also have a sizable WordPress design project looming and I need to really grok all the possibilities with theme development. Client deadlines are always the best motivator.
And in my explorations I came across the WordPress Theme Toolkit. It is a very nice set of methods to provide end-user customizations over your theme. It does require comfort with PHP programming, but then you probably already have this if you’re building your own theme. What it doesn’t require is the need to dig into how to expose your stuff in the WordPress admin interface. The toolkit provides a method to collect input information from the user, which can then be used in functions you create and use in various parts of the theme.
Now that I’ve started looking I see this being used in a lot of themes. It certainly makes sense for something you want to release to the world at large. But even in the small projects I’ve done so far there are always elements that people want to edit over time. At the moment I’ve been hard coding things, and need to re-code it when things change. The tool kit will make this a thing of the past!
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