So we’ve been doing a lot of development work with the Genesis Framework from StudioPress over the past few months and I thought I’d share with you some of our experiences in the form of a Getting Started with Genesis tutorial series.
Over the series, we’ll bring you through the basics of creating your first Child theme. So Part 1 starts right now!
How do I setup my first Genesis WordPress child theme?
The first really really important thing to remember is that Genesis is like any other WordPress Parent/child theme relationship. You must have the parent Genesis theme installed before you build your first child theme. For now, we’ll assume you’ve got your hands on Genesis and …

Siobhan over at WPMU posted the other day about some of her favour plugins and themes of 2010 and included the fantastic Quality Control WordPress theme on her best of post series.
Sadly, according to Siobhan the developer is in the process of passing the theme over to a commercial theme company. The developer, Spencer Finnell used to update his blog on the development of Quality Control, which I would assume he must no longer do. You will also see a link to what looks like the themes new home at http://getqualitycontrol.com/
While the theme has since been removed from the official WordPress theme directory, it is still available in the official WordPress subversion repository and whoever …

Congratulations to Yoast for putting together a fantastic post detailing the anatomy of a WordPress theme. In one nice infographic Yoast basically lays out the building blocks of every parent WordPress theme. It explains the role of each file simply and clearly and while it seems like something that should have been around a long time ago on the WordPress site itself – it wasn’t and I think it will be a big help for anyone getting started with WordPress theme development.

Today saw a fantastic post from Siobhan over at WPMU about why you should never rely on google search results when it comes to downloading WordPress themes. Seriously guys, this post is a first class education for anyone who downloads and plays around with WordPress themes – free or premium – and the things you need to be on the lookout for. I knew that dodgy practices were widespread but the findings of Siobhan’s research are astonishing. 8 of the top 10 sites in Google’s search results for “free wordpress themes” contained encrytped dodgy code and/or very poor theme standards.
Google gets over 200,000 searches per month for the phrase “free wordpress themes” (as estimated by …

WPLift have put together a nice list of Celebrities currently using WordPress to power their websites. This list features some sites we included in our list of Massive sites powered by WordPress from November.
I particularly like Rocky’s website (I mean Sly Stallone of course).

Well looky here we’ve hit our 24th Theme Tip of December just in time for Christmas!
(UPDATE: Ok yes, it’s now the 6th of January 2011 and for some bloody reason this post never made it live on Christmas but we’re gonna still pretend it’s Christmas ok!)
It’s been a bit of a roller coaster year for WordPress in 2010. Lots of things happened in the WordPress community in general. We got WordPress 3.0 which has been a sensation for me. We got a boatload of theme frameworks maturing to a point where I see this as being the real future of WordPress theme development. We had our very own mexican standoff between Matt and Chris about …

Honestly, if you make themes – you need this.
Go get Theme Check.

Ok kicking off a new post series for 2011 is our first Site of the Week – ThemeGrade.com
We’re a little bit jealous about this site actually. It’s been on my todo list for quite some time now to build something like what Brian has built over on themegrade.com
In a nutshell, for those who don’t already know what themegrade is, it’s basically a grading and rating service for all the major WordPress theme providers.
Think Tripadvisor for WordPress themes.
I gotta say, Brian has done a wonderful job at setting up a great rating algorithm which seems quite fair and useful.
There is also a pretty nifty search facility which allows you to specify the types of themes you …

A very Happy New Year to you all!
I’m just back from vacation and just noticed that the final post in the 24 Theme Tips series failed to post correctly on December 24th! Blame some early pre-Christmas celebrations
Anyway I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas vacation. We’re looking forward to lots of exciting new developments in the WordPress theme community in 2011.
Ok gotta run, there is a missing Theme tip post to hunt out and post