We put together a short video that goes over the files included in the starter theme we will be using to build our premium WordPress themes. Underscores.me includes all the files you need to start development on a WordPress theme. The video below briefly describes the included files and how they are used. We will dig deeper into each file and how they work as we build out different pages and functionality.
Free
Turning the starter theme into our Premium WordPress theme
This is a quick video that briefly goes over our plans with this course. The end goal is to take our starter theme from Underscorces.me and turn it into one of our most popular WordPress themes, StrapPress. Once we have the base of StrapPress built, we will start adding other features and styles. This will be similar to the themes over at GentsThemes.com.
Downloading the Underscores.me WordPress Theme
Our tutorials are going to use Underscores.me as the starter theme for our tutorials on building a premium WordPress theme. Couple reasons why we picked to use this theme:
- includes HTML5 markup
- very minimal, which is good since we will be learning, customizing, and adding features
- GPL license, so we can do whatever we want with it
- tons of smart people have contributed to it – so it’s a no brainer..
The video below goes over how to Download the theme. Pretty simple, but a necessary step to get up and running.
Setup local development environment for WordPress
The first step I normally do when creating a new WordPress theme is to make sure my local environment is setup. This includes:
- setting up a local personal server with a package like MAMP (mac users), WAMP (windows users), or LAMP (linux users)
- creating a database for your local WordPress development site
- downloading and installing the WordPress files
Depending on which operating system you are using, the process will be a little different. There are hundreds of written and video tutorials around the web on how to setup a local WordPress development environment, so we are not going to reinvent the wheel and make our own tutorial. Instead we are going to list some resources below to help you get started.