The majority of website developers will find themselves working in WordPress and the design and development of Themes is all part of the process. Once you begin developing themes you’ll soon realize that many functions can be standardized and put into a basic starter kit which gives you a launch pad for the rest of your development.

1. Eight Key Functions to Kick-Start Wordpress Theme Development
The majority of website developers will find themselves working in
WordPress and the design and development of Themes is all part of the
process. Once you begin developing themes you’ll soon realize that many
functions can be standardized and put into a basic starter kit which gives you
a launch pad for the rest of your development.

2. To build your starter’s kit you need to pinpoint the most common functions and
include them all in the functions.php file. Below we’ve collated eight key functions
you should include in your starter kit.
1. Custom Menu Support
WordPress 3.0 saw the introduction of the navigation menu feature which
allows for the instinctive creation of navigation menus within themes. A
standard theme requires at least a main navigation menu, traditionally
positioned in the header and sometimes a secondary navigation menu in the
footer. To achieve this you need to register both these menus in the
functions.php in the format shown below.

3. These menus are now registered but you need to tell the theme where to position
them. The “Main Menu” is going to appear in the header so in the header.php you
input the following:
You then need to check if the “main_menu” menu is defined and then if it has been
you then insert its contents. If not you can fall back to the default
wp_list_pages() which can be customised to display links as necessary.

4. 2. Custom Avatar Support
Most people who comment online, as is common with WordPress sites,
have their own personal avatar. There are some who don’t and if you don’t
particularly like the avatars provided as default by WordPress you can
customise them. To do this add the following code to your functions.php
file.

5. 3. Style your Visual Editor
This function allows for custom CSS to style WordPress TinyMCE visual editor. You
need to create a CSS file named editor-style.css and paste your styles within. In
your functions.php you then insert
add_editor_style();
It then makes sense to setup the editor for right-to-left languages and create a
further CSS file called editor-style-rtl.css in the theme directory and then include
the following code as a minimum.

6. 4. Featured Image Function
This function allows you to choose a representative image for all posts,
pages and custome posts. To enable this you need to include the following
in your functions.php file.
add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
You can leave it like this but it would be detrimental to your website
development. Instead you should define the thumbnail sizes for your
featured posts. To do this you need to take advantage of the
add_image_size() function which tells WordPress to make copies of the
chosen image in defined sizes which you would code as below:

7. 5. Post Formats
The post formats function allows to customise how your posts are styled
and presented. There are nine different standard formats offered by
WordPress: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, and
chat. To add this functionality you need to specify the type of post format
you want to use in your functions.php file for example:

8. 6. Basic Pagination
Your themes may all have different pagination needs but beginning with the
following defaults will see you well:

9. 7. Content Width Definition
The content width function allows you to specify maximum widths for videos,
images and other embedded content. It means that if you choose to paste a
YouTube URL into the WordPress editor the CMS will automatically display the
video and it won’t exceed the maximum width set, if you use the
$content_width variable in your functions.php file as below.

10. 8. Add Dynamic Sidebar
The theme that you’re developing will need at least one sidebar. Defining a
sidebar is pretty straightforward, you simply need to add the below to your
functions.php file. Doing so will register and define your “Main Sidebar”.
When you want more than one you can edit the above code and register
further as necessary.
These eight functions are likely to be central to all your WordPress theme
developments. All developers should have them in their arsenal to get off to
a quick and easy start.

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