My first Steps in Wordpress Theme Development

Disclaimer: This is a cross-post from my dev-blog at nitricware.com.

For my new project "Geriatrie2Go.eu" - a blog about health care in geriatrics - I tried to find the perfect Wordpress theme. However, I couldn't find one that satisfied my needs. So I built one myself using Docker.

For easy development without the hassle of either installing a wordpress blog locally or shoveling my theme files after every change onto a server, I decided to use Docker. Luckily, someone created a very neat blogpost that guides you thru this process.

Creating a full fledged WordPress theme which supports all of the CMS' features can be quite exhaustive. However, WordPress is built in a way, that makes most of the work optional. For example: Once you created an index.php page you're somewhat done. Except, of course, you want page templates to look different, or single post templates or search results or...

There are great resources on how to build a WordPress theme out there. Especially the ones from the creators of WordPress;

Another topic that can make creating WordPress themes challenging for a novice like me are modern web features and the devices out there. A theme should be responsive. The simpler your theme, the simpler it is to make it responsive. I even managed to include support for dark mode.

At the end of the day, I managed to release v0.1 of wp-latex-theme, a very simple wordpress that resembles the LaTeX layout. It can be found over at Github. Please help me improve it (i.e. by adding support for comments or other post types or by localizing it). Also check out the project I made the theme for.