Wordpress Templates

[bdgardengirl]

I would love to learn more about customizing an existing WP template and/or making a child template. I've found several sites that seemed promising, but when I tried to follow the tutorial, things were missing (maybe just my braincells) but in any case I got stuck. Any suggestions? Or better yet, anyone have time to help me out? The beer's on me! Here are the sites that I've already tried.
http://jonathanwold.com/tutorials/wordpress_theme/
http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/

[deconspray]

bdgardengirl, I too have a great interest and have begun playing with this.

An online tutorial (screencast) I used was from CSS-Tricks. He emphasizes how you can customize. There's several segments. Hope this takes you a bit further.

http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/25-designing-for-wordpress-part-one/
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/26-designing-for-wordpress-part-two/
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/27-designing-for-wordpress-part-three/
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/41-wordpress-as-a-cms/
http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/44-hodgepodge-of-wordpress-tricks/ 

There's also a tut on adding an eCommerce plugin into a Wordpress CMS site:

http://css-tricks.com/video-screencasts/56-integrating-foxycart-and-wordpress/ 

[bdgardengirl]

Thanks for the links, I'll have to take a look. I actually went back and went through this tutorial

http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007/02/19/so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh/
,got my 1st index page built fairly cleanly and got the CSS working.

Now I have one of those issues that I've googled and this appears to be a WP 2.7 bug that has yet to be addressed. When just adding text to a page or post, and hitting Enter to create a paragraph break - when you save the page all the <P> tags get stripped, making text run together. This is a fairly major bug as far as I can see, especially if you want to hand over a WP site to an end user. I've tried manually adding P tags and <br/> tags in the HTML view (not something I would want to have to show a client), as well as trying to add a bottom margin to P in CSS. These all seem to have temporary effects, but not permanent.

Maybe I'm missing something basic? (Although my reading of WP forums would lead me to believe that I'm not alone.) If anyone has an idea on this one, please let me know!