Chapter 6: Digging into Advanced Theme Development

In This Chapter

• Customizing themes
• Creating new templates
• Activating custom menus
• Exploring custom post types
• Understanding post formats
• Using post thumbnails for feature images
• Building a theme options page

The previous chapters of this minibook describe WordPress themes and using their structure to build your site. Delving into deeper topics can help you create flexible themes that offer users options to control the theme.

Whether you're building a theme for a client, the WordPress.org theme directory, or yourself, adding advanced theme features can make theme development easier and faster with a high-quality result. With these advanced theme concepts and tools, you can build robust, dynamic themes that allow for easier design customization and offer a variety of layout options.

Beyond just tools and methods of advanced theme development, this chapter provides some development practices that help projects succeed.