Getting started with developing themes

We discussed the development tasks involved in themes in the preceding section. Building a theme from scratch is a process with a very wide scope and hence not feasible to discuss in this type of book. Therefore, we will focus on customizing existing themes while providing the necessary knowledge to build themes from scratch. There are two ways of adding or modifying features in an existing theme:

  • Building and customizing features of a design by modifying template files
  • Extending theme features through available filters and actions

Both of these techniques require us to modify the files of an existing theme. In most sites, we will be using existing, free, or premium themes that have developed by third-party ...

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