Image courtesy: 4_EveR_YounG

If you know about blogging, you must have heard about the world’s most famous blogging platform WORDPRESS. Wordpress always believes on open source and work according to that. Thanks to this feature, a blogger who is using Wordpress as the blogging platform is free to do any customization for his/her copy. Obviously anyone will first go with the customizing the theme. I also use Wordpress as the platform for this blog and when I started, I found a theme and did some modifications and now you are seeing my customized theme in this blog. But the original theme has done by another great person. I was curious about how to design a Wordpress theme and looking for some information wanting to start designing my owned theme. I write this post to inform that I see a brighter path now and developing a professional looking Wordpress theme. When I finish this I will put it here for you all to download free without putting into my blog .

I thought that it will be better and interesting if let you all know how I started this and what I have learned so far. I will add more posts when I proceed with it. To tell you the truth when I started, I had no idea what so ever about theme development. I did some research with the help of Google and Wordpress itself and managed to get information to start this learning process. Wordpress Codex helped me a lot. I found that the following aspects must be considered before starting real design and coding.

• You must have a sound understanding about CSS and HTML components and a web design software like Dreamweaver.
• You must have at least a little understanding about PHP and identifying PHP code from the existing templates.
• You must have a good knowledge on a graphic design software like Photoshop.
• You must be aware about the Wordpress theme design guidelines provided by Wordpress.

Then you will need a pen or pencil with some drafting papers. If you are OK with all the above mentioned factors, you are ready to go. But keep in mind that if you are starting from the scratch, it will take more time for you to design the first theme. I’m experiencing this. But when you finish your first theme, it will not take much time to design the next themes. If you are willing to find out how I’m doing this and to download the completed theme in the future, I recommend you to subscribe for my RSS feed in the top right hand corner or Here.

Image courtesy: Etolane

I thought to write this post on a very good plugin which automates Wordpress upgrade process. Some of you might have heard about it. It is called Wordpress Automatic upgrade. It automates all the required steps to follow manually in a Wrodpress upgrade. I also wanted to upgrade my blog’s Wordpress version 2.5. I used this plugin few hours ago and it was awesome. You are now looking at a Wordpress blog which is upgraded to version 2.5 .

Here’s how Wordpress describes it.

Wordpress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

If you haven’t upgraded your Wordpress version to 2.5 and don’t like to get messed up with the manual upgrading, this is the best plugin ever which will ease your work and stress. It even provides a temporary “The site is being Upgraded” page while you are running the upgrade process. But as a precaution I recommend you to get backups of your current installation and the database . If anything goes wrong, you can revert back . Anyway the probability of happening that is very low. But the experience I had with this plugin, I found that it doesn’t re-activate the whole pugins which were deactivated before. But it is nothing much a problem. You can activate them manually when you want.