I’ve been researching tutorial sites for advanced WordPress theme development lately and have discovered some excellent resources. The WordPress community is passionate about the platform. This is reflected in the outstanding theme development I’ve seen in the past several months.

Here is my collection of resources for aspiring and advanced WordPress developers.

WordPress Codex:
The WordPress Codex is the Vatican of the WordPress universe. All knowledge resides here. The community is constantly updated detailed information covering every aspect of coding in WordPress. The Encyclopedia nature of this site is best used as a reference tool rather than a tutorial.

How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch by Kai Loon
Kai has put together a very readable yet detailed three part tutorial on WordPress Theme development. My favorite section is the tag definitions. This is an excellent learning tool to see all of the WordPress tags in a single location. He does this with each primary section of a theme. I’ve read and referred to this site many times, and can’t recommend it enough.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from scratch by Sam Parkinson
Sam created an excellent overview on WordPress Theme development. LIke Kai’s site he provides detailed explanations followed by detailed code examples.
Additionally there are other articles on this site covering WordPress plug-in development. Overall this resource is excellent, and one I refer to quite a bit.

Jquery.com
This resource is for advanced developers, or those who dare to take a dive in the deep end of WordPress Theme extension. If you’ve ever run across sliding panels, or ajax type interactive tabs, then it’s likely the developer used jquery.com as their resource. This is a huge library of free scripts and lesson on how to implement them. Any developer with basic PHP and java knowledge can make these work. It’s worth checking out and bookmarking this page, as I’m seeing a rapid growth in these components within the WordPress theme community.