For anyone out there using the very popular WordPress "publishing platform", you might be looking for a way to tweak the interface to look just like you want it - but where to start? Well, an article series from Chris Davis' blog just might help you out.

So lets talk about Custom Templates, and more importantly how we can bend them to our will. Now I am assuming that by now everyone has at least a passing familiarity with Templates in WP 1.5, for those who are not up-to-speed, lets cover some back-story.

There are three parts to his "Secrets of WP Theming" series:

• Part 1 - the basics and creating a sample page
• Part 2 - writing some PHP to create some custom lists (and a sidebar)
• Part 3 - wrapping it all up with a grab of information from the database