Tag Archives: Resources

[ad_1] So You Want to Learn WordPress Development WordPress development is a hugely useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things out-of-order and try to tackle advanced topics while remaining confused on the fundamentals. This free WordPress development course is designed to get you familiar with the basics of how WordPress works as a technical system. Because we start at the beginning, this WordPress development course is the right foundation for you to learn WordPress development as quickly as possible. You should also know that this course is just a small preview of our flagship guide to WordPress development, Up and Running. If you’re serious about learning, Up and Running is the best WordPress development course available. Serious About Learning WordPress Development? Up and Running is our complete “learn WordPress development” course. Now in its updated and expanded Third Edition, it’s helped hundreds of happy buyers learn WordPress development the fast, smart, and thorough way.   “I think anyone interested in learning WordPress development NEEDS this course. Before I purchased Up and Running, I had taught myself some WordPress code, but lacked direction. Watching the course’s videos was like a bunch of lights being turned on. I went from being vaguely familiar with how themes, functions and WordPress itself worked to mastering these. Everything became much clearer. I very happily recommend this course to anyone willing to listen.” –Jason Robie, WordPress developer Take the next step in your WordPress development journey! This free course can get you started and oriented to the basics of WordPress development, starting with: What is WordPress, and what does it do? 1. Beginning at the Beginning: What WordPress Is To learn WordPress development, you need to know what WordPress is. Our “factory analogy” is the best overall explanation we’ve found for what WordPress, as a technology, is and does. WordPress is a Factory: A Technical Introduction Summary: What WordPress Is WordPress is a factory that makes webpages. To start learning WordPress development, start by knowing what WordPress is, meaning what it’s useful for. (Yes, it’s a PHP-based, open-source content management system, but what does it do?) The best definition we’ve found is an analogy: WordPress is a factory. Specifically, WordPress is a factory that makes webpages, by taking raw material from the database and processing it through various “factory lines”—WordPress’s core code itself, plus additional code from both themes and plugins—all to generate a finished product ready to send to the user’s browser. The Factory Analogy in Detail Here is more detail on the “WordPress is a factory” analogy as a tool to help you learn WordPress development: The environment of the WordPress factory is the server, the computer connected to the internet that everything is stored on. (“Buying hosting” means buying space on a server.) The server takes production requests from clients—users running web browsers—and is responsible for assembling a completed product ready for the web browser to display to the user. The WordPress factory’s primary raw materials are its posts, and its warehouse (where it stores these raw materials) is the MySQL database. In response to a production order from the browser (“assemble and send back the completed webpage corresponding to the URL I’ve just requested”), WordPress fetches the correct raw materials from the database. WordPress sends that raw material down the factory’s assembly lines, which are the bulk of WordPress’s code itself. These give the webpage its inner workings: the fundamentals of what data it will include, and in what order. WordPress has assembly lines specifically for handling display: how the product will be “painted” to appear to the user (regardless of its underlying data). These appearance-focused assembly lines are the PHP template files of the WordPress theme. The factory can call on specialized outside contractors for specific jobs. These are WordPress plugins, and they can enter at any point in the factory process using WordPress’s hooks system. The finished product is the full HTML markup necessary to display a webpage. The factory ships this product to the requesting user’s browser on every page load. Read the article to understand the WordPress factory analogy in more detail. If you absorb the analogy deeply, you’ll have an uncommonly good picture of what WordPress is, and that’s the right first step in learning WordPress development—even before looking at code. 2. How to Program in WordPress: WordPress’s Four Key Technical Languages The next step in your WordPress developer training is to know what programming languages you’ll be using. This next article introduces the four most important technical languages in WordPress—HTML, PHP, CSS, and JavaScript—and outlines what each one does. The Four Languages You Must Know to Understand WordPress Summary: WordPress’s Four Technical Languages This basic WordPress development course can’t teach you coding languages in depth, but it can let you know which languages to learn, and what they do. In order of importance, these are the four technical languages used in WordPress development: PHP, the main programming language of WordPress. PHP is the primary language that the WordPress software itself is written in, the primary language of WordPress themes and plugins, and the language you’ll be writing most as a WordPress developer. CSS, a declarative langauge controlling presentation, how webpages look to the user. CSS can control virtually every aspect of presentation, from sizes to margins to colors to fonts to responsive behavior on different devices. When you want to make a WordPress site look a certain way, CSS starts where page builder features and theme options stop. HTML, the language of the web. HTML is a declarative language that web browsers interpret to turn a stream of code into a visible webpage with text, images, and everything else. If you don’t understand HTML, you certainly can’t do WordPress development in depth, but it’s also true that much of the time you’ll be writing PHP whose function is to turn itself into HTML, rather than writing HTML directly. JavaScript, for programming the front-end. JavaScript is a very powerful programming language that can be used for all