What is your Wordpress 2.9 theme development workflow after getting PSD from client?

Question

• What are useful and free resources to make Wordpress 2.9 themes?

Is Dreamweaver helpful to make themes ? What are time saving tips? I'm using Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows. and my main browser is FF 3.6. I know some extensions of dreamweaver but those are not updated with wordpress versions.

• Should we edit theme files directly on live server or Local XAMPP option is better?
• Should i create XHTML CSS version of PSD then XHTML CSS to wordpress?
• After making XHTML CSS Version of PSD how to incorporate Wordpress 2.9 Tags in it?

Has anyone tried this tool http://www.themedreamer.com/ is this really helpful?

Answer 1

Learn PHP. Dreamweaver has built in tools for this.

Answer 2

Answers to your three questions:

1. You should have a local development environment. It's faster to work this way. Divide your project into smaller tasks. When you're done testing each task, upload your theme to the live site to test.
2. Yes, you should create the markup (XHTML or HTML) first, then CSS, and finally WordPress theme
3. What do you mean incorporating WordPress tags in your theme? If you want to display tags in your posts, simply use the_tags() inside the Loop. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags .

One book that I recommend you read is Digging into WordPress: http://digwp.com/ . It shows you exactly how to get started developing themes for WordPress.