Premium themes are often a good compromise between using a common free theme available from the WordPress Themes Directory or other source. And having a completely unique custom designed theme that could cost thousands of dollars. Table below provides a list of premium theme suppliers and price ranges. Premium Theme providers selection table: Supplier...

Find and Implement WordPress Premium Theme! Theme designers in the WordPress community are split down the GPL line. From the Automattic side of the house (the main proprietor of WordPress), there is no endorsement of premium themes (whether by explicit blessing or by implicit inclusion in the Themes Directory). In fact, this side of the argument has...

Finding and Implementing Free Themes!! WordPress themes are the other side of WordPress extensibility. In Part II of this article series, We took a long, hard look at plugins, hooks, widgets, and other aspects of extending WordPress with plugins. The other side of that equation is themes. As with plugins, WordPress has an entire theme infrastructure...

Much science (or in some cases, voodoo) goes into creating a good user experience. Experts agree on many principles, but the devil is usually in the details. Many of the practicalities of user experience are subjective or change based on the demographic of a site, or the messaging and branding involved. Note: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and styling...

Using Free or Premium Themes for WordPress. In WordPress, themes are a major part of the user experience. As with any Web site, the user interface can make or break a site’s capability to build traffic, expose content for discovery, and enhance user stickiness. Finding the balance between these three areas is a somewhat fuzzy, experimental process....

Using Loops in WordPress Strategically. Throughout this article, I’ve presumed you will use WP_Query to instantiate a custom Loop. This is seen by many to be a best practice because it enables you to operate with more than one Loop. As the cornerstone of WordPress, the Loop is very important and it is common to need to query the posts more than...

Alter MySQL Query: WordPress enables you to pass many query string variables to adjust the data request of the query. The variables can be in an array or in a query string, which is a set of key/value pairs separated by ampersands (&). You can pass in as many or as few of these as you wish. The query string variables available to alter MySQL Database...

Develop Custom and Multiple Loops. If you would like to develop custom and multiple loops, fortunately for many developers and particularly theme developers. Most instances of a Loop do not require modification of the query. Many of the special cases for Loop generation can be handled simply by passing a query string to a new WP_Query instance or...

If you’ve made it this far in this book, you understand how to build plugins, use the WordPress hook system to alter the way WordPress behaves. Developping themes to present the content to the user, and leverage the widget system to modify the look and feel of a blog. In this article, I address the single most important piece of WordPress: the...

Preventing WordPress MYSQL Injection! If you’ve spent any serious time developing Web applications, you know of the risk of MySQL injection. MySQL injection is caused when data is inserted into the database that hasn’t been properly sanitized. For example, a classic demonstration of MySQL injection would be an exploit that gives a malicious person...