Coming to terms with the fact that I don’t always have enough client work on my plate, and that there is an innate desire to always be working, I’m being to explore the world of professional theme development. I’ve a couple of upcoming projects that I’ve spent a good part of the morning searching the premium WordPress theme galleries, but still am left unsatisfied. The other challenge that I run into is that the themes that I might have considered usually feature quasi-pornographic or sensual imagery. I can afford to look at so I have to click away immediately. Here’s at least on guy who might have bought your theme if you demos had better imagery.

WordPress Theme Development Process

So I’ve taken the plunge to look into how to become a full fledged theme developer. The first step appears to become familiar with WordPress’s own theme submission process. I’ve looked into theme development a dozen times before, but for some reason I didn’t realize there was an active team of theme reviewers and that only a fraction of all themes that get submitted actually get approved.  1 in 5 as of this writing!  That’s pretty steep rejection rate.

At any rate here’s a couple of links that I thought helpful as I’ve begun this process:

First, the official documentation about WordPress theme development:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

Next, here’s where the themes get reviewed:

http://make.wordpress.org/themes/

(I’m considering signing up.) The about page in the right navigation has a great deal of information to get anyone new started on the path to contribution.

Finally, I’m going to be doing most of my development testing on my localhost XAMPP server. I’ve had a little trouble with the .htaccess file working  in with the local Apache server on my computer.  The problem is that I have the permalink structure of my WordPress site set to custom instead of the default “?p=[some number]”. I like the pretty urls, so I did a quick google search and found this helpful article:

http://www.lancelhoff.com/how-to-make-wordpress-permalinks-work-in-xampp/

Thanks to Lance Hoff for taking the time to explain this. Hopefully this helps someone else.