Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful

Unlike his previous Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, which was all over the place, Thord Daniel Hedengren’s Smashing WordPress Themes: Making WordPress Beautiful focuses mainly on theme development.

To help readers understand how theming works, Hedengren deconstructs WordPress’s default Twenty Ten. He then explains the concept of child theme and how quickly one can build his own based on a parent theme or a framework. The selling point of this book is obviously how to build one’s own theme and Hedengren has done a great job of walking readers through three different sites: semi-static (for small, corporation site), media (for portfolio site) and magazine. He also covers briefly on BuddyPress, a plugin that adds social-networking features to WordPress-powered site.

Because of its flexibility and easy-to-use admin interface, WordPress is a perfect tool for clients who would like to update contents themselves. Smashing WordPress Themes is an excellent guide for web designers who would like to build sites using WordPress as a content management system.