WordPress is undoubtedly an amazing publishing platform. You can get started as quickly as with few clicks or you can customize it to any level you want. The internet is filled with good quality tutorials on customizing every aspect of WordPress. Here are some excellent tutorials that will help wordpress theme developers make better themes and give them an idea of different and unique ways to customize WordPress according to need.

How to Create a Theme Development Environment for a Live WordPress Site

Any good website owner knows that they need to be constantly looking at ways to improve their site even through small little tweaks. If you’re using WordPress you’ll notice that it isn’t easy to create a development version without creating a separate installation. Of course, you can make changes directly on a live WordPress site but that isn’t recommended for anything other than minor tweaks.

The complete guide to creating widgets in WordPress 2.8

I have seen some good tutorials on creating widgets for WordPress 2.8 floating around the WordPress-o-Sphere. But, I didn’t feel any of them really covered practical usage.

Make a control panel for your wordpress theme

Learn how to create a control panel for your theme.

Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch

In today’s tutorial we’ll be talking about creating a WordPress plugin that extracts and displays products from an external OSCommerce shop database. We will start by describing the file structure of a plugin and where it must be included in the WordPress structure, then we’ll be having a closer look at how to make our plugin visible for WordPress and integrating it with actions run by its frame.

Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes

In this post you’ll learn to take advantage of Filter Hooks in your WordPress Child Themes. Filter Hooks are an essential weapon in your WordPress Theming arsenal. With them you’ll have almost complete control over the HTML created by your WordPress Theme—without touching any template files.

10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks

Hooks are very useful in WordPress. They allow you to “hook” a custom function to an existing function, which allows you to modify WordPress’ functionality without editing core files. In this article, we have compiled 10 extremely useful ready-to-use WordPress hooks, along with examples and coding explanations.

WordPress Custom Post Types Guide

One of the most anticipated features of WordPress 3.0 was the ability to add your own custom post types to WordPress, which allows you to display and categorize different types of content outside of the 5 native WordPress content types (i.e. Post, Page, Attachment, and so forth). The addition of this feature is a big step forward in making WordPress a full-fledged CMS, extending outside its normal use as a blogging platform.

Creating a Tabbed Widget for Custom Post Types

Custom post types give you unlimited possibilities for creating content. The trick is trying to present it all to your users. We’re talking bounce rate here, and one of the best ways to decrease your bounce rate and keep users on your site is to present as much content as possible in a clean and organized manner. This tutorial offers one solution by showing you how to create a custom, tabbed widget that grabs your latest articles from multiple custom post types, and as a bonus, shows you how to display star ratings next to each post!

Custom Post Type Snippets to make you smile

So it’s friday, I’ve been coding all day and I thought I’d share some of the cool snippets I’ve come across and/or developed today. I’ve mostly been working with Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, so let me share some of that goodness.

An In-Depth Look at the Dashboard Widgets API

The WordPress Dashboard is the first thing a user views when they login to manage their website. This presents an opportunity to greet them with useful information regarding their theme, as well as an opportunity to attract recurring customers, whether it’s through displaying your blog’s RSS feed to them, a donation link, or displaying the recent posts from a custom post type in your theme. This is all possible using WordPress’s Dashboard Widgets API.

Introducing WordPress 3 Custom Taxonomies

WordPress 3 fills in a number of important gaps towards being a serious content management system. The easy-to-use custom taxonomies function gives site designers some powerful tools for building a good information architecture. Learn what taxonomies are, why they’re useful, and how to use them in today’s tutorial!

Create an Options Page For Your WordPress Theme

Including a Theme Options page for your theme is one of the best ways to increase ease-of-use for managing a complex theme. However, a few quick Google searches later and most people give up. Such a great inclusion for theme design appears to have such little documentation, that it appears to be one of those heavily guarded secrets which only the crème de la crème of designers hold the key to.

How to Create a Better WordPress Options Panel

Today, we’ll go through the entire process of creating an admin options panel for a WordPress theme, using the excellent WooFramework as an example. Then, we’ll take things a step further, as we implement jQuery to improve some of the functionality.

Mastering WordPress Shortcodes

Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are powerful but still yet quite unknown WordPress functions. Imagine you could just type “adsense” to display an AdSense ad or “post_count” to instantly find out the number of posts on your blog.

Create a Multi-Layout Portfolio with WordPress

WordPress, as a content management system, is often used for creating portfolio websites. With the evolution of user interface design and functionalities, a new trend has emerged: displaying portfolio items in different layouts. This tutorial details the process of creating a dedicated portfolio section in WordPress’ backend, and using jQuery and CSS3 to display the portfolio in a classy manner.