{"id":3119,"date":"2012-03-16T15:35:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T02:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordcamp.org.nz\/?p=3119"},"modified":"2012-03-16T15:35:20","modified_gmt":"2012-03-16T02:35:20","slug":"how-to-pick-a-theme-sam-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newzealand.wordcamp.org\/2012\/how-to-pick-a-theme-sam-cooke\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Pick a Theme – Sam Cooke"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sam<\/a>

Sam Cooke - Thinkbox- NZ<\/p><\/div>\n

In recent years the number of themes has exploded. On the main WordPress theme repository<\/a> alone there are “1,515<\/strong>\u00a0THEMES, with\u00a045,581,689<\/strong>\u00a0downloads, and counting”.<\/p>\n

Sam from thinkbox in Featherston<\/a> will be talking us through his checklist of how to tell themes apart, what makes some good, some great and some not.<\/p>\n

For non WordPress users the theme is the design part that glues the back (database) and front end ( menus & visuals) of the website together.<\/p>\n

A slightly more tech description would be a theme is part code & part graphics or a bunch of cascading stylesheets, some php and other code types ( esp. JS for menus ) and other web browser specific tweaks.<\/p>\n

Most users tend to look at the overall layout. For example – Does the theme \u00a0have a header, footer and columns combo that they like? Wireframing<\/a> is a key part of the theme road mapping process.<\/p>\n

On the other hand depending upon resources many users will use an off the shelf free theme with a small amount of customisation for their branding and maybe fonts.\u00a0The best practice way to do this is to use a child theme<\/a>\u00a0approach.<\/p>\n

In the mid range there are premium themes which all seems to be dominated by sliders and things that would annoy even some flash designers:) So how to pick one of them and how to change it to suit – that is the theme challenge.<\/p>\n

At the higher end; a custom theme where literally anything is possible and it’s back to wireframing, PSD’s, slice to code and convert to WordPress templates and usually a framework (options setup) of some kind to make the back end management easier.<\/p>\n

As well as the checklist Sam will zone in on ” theming”, “theme anatomy”, “WP as CMS”, “making it cool for your customers”and other aspects of theme wrangling.<\/p>\n

This talk will be suited for all users – especially new ones and WordPress.com users who now have a great deal of theme and styling flexibility compared to the recent past.<\/p>\n

So what kind of themes does Sam work on? Here are 4 of his recent projects<\/p>\n