How To Make a WordPress Theme Using Starkers

Today I’m going to show you how to make a WordPress theme using Starkers, my favorite naked theme. There are 2 ways on how to make a WordPress theme, one is to build everything from scratch and the other is to edit an existing theme. Obviously we’re going to take on the latter approach. Don’t forget that you can also use child themes in making your WordPress themes.

Let’s get started. Make sure you download Starkers and save it to your themes folder (/wp-content/themes/).

Note: This tutorial is strictly for beginners only

Review Mark-Up

Starkers has a really stripped down markup. You won’t find any divs if you’ll check out the source.

Add Divisions

I tried to make a layout off of the default Starker’s markup but it’s really quite challenging. So what we’re going to do is add some divisions on the existing markup so it would like this:

Header

Let’s add a container div that will hold our content. Open up header.php and add in the opening container div right after the body tag and before the header div. We also need to add a header div for our logo and tagline.

Footer

Now we need to close our container div. To do that we’re going to open footer.php and add our closing container div. We also need a div for our footer section.

Index

Now open up index.php and apply the following changes:

Please remember that you also need to make the following changes in some of the template files like search.php, page.php, archive.php, etc.

Posts

After you’re all done with the changes, it’s time to open up single.php. The changes are also similar to the previous step but this time we’re going to add a function to output our sidebar. Starkers is based from Kubrick that’s why you’re going to notice that single.php has no function for getting the sidebar.

Now all that’s left is to put in some CSS. You can download my stylesheet or you can just create your own.

Conclusion

This is only a simple 2-column blog layout. I know you can do better than this and I hope that you found some value in this tutorial. Thanks for reading.