In-Depth WordPress Tutorials for Developers

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Our "Start Here" Guides

These core WordPress development tutorials will get you started on the right foot.

Recently Published

Check out our most recently published WordPress development tutorials, thoughts and advice on working as a WordPress developer, and WordPress development news.

White Screen of Death? Turn on WP_DEBUG

By David Hayes

  WordPress people will often talk about the “white screen of death” or WSOD. They’re referring to when a WordPress site just stops making web pages and instead offers only a giant white field. This is intimidating for anyone, but especially new developers who’ve never seen it before. Generally the issue will be caused by […]

How to Create a Text Outline in CSS

By Fred Meyer

Sometimes you need an outline around your text. A recent project required me to place white text on a multicolored image background, so giving that text a black outline was important for readability. Should be easy, right? Just declare text-outline: 1px black solid;, and we’re done. Except text-outline doesn’t exist in CSS, and the thing that […]

Using the CSS3 vh (viewport-height) Unit

By Fred Meyer
vh viewport-height css3 element

I’ve recently fallen in love with the CSS3 vh property. (vh stands for “viewport-height.”) It lets you make things a certain percentage of the height of your browser window itself—whether that “viewport” is a tablet screen, a phone screen (in portrait or landscape), a laptop, a desktop, a smart fridge(?), or what have you. In […]

How to Change Your Default Category From “Uncategorized” in WordPress

By David Hayes

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll show you how to change your WordPress default category from “Uncategorized” to something custom! Why You’d Want to Change Your WordPress Default Category Categories are a type of default WordPress taxonomy that helps users organize their posts. You might have noticed that WordPress, by default, automatically categorizes […]

How to Prevent Browser Caching of a CSS Stylesheet in WordPress

By Fred Meyer

This video and text Quick Guide explains how to prevent browser caching of CSS files in WordPress. The CSS cache busting tricks here will work outside WordPress, too: you’ll just need your own method of adding query strings. Why Browsers Cache CSS Stylesheets When a browser caches a CSS stylesheet, what it’s doing is getting […]

How to Use get_the_author_meta in WordPress to Show Author Info

By David Hayes

Your author’s are the heart of most WordPress sites. They write your content, engage with your audience, and generally make the site work as it should. As such, you’ll often want to get WP author meta from the site so that you can show it off in your template. The way to get meta author […]

How to Auto Update the Copyright Year in a WordPress Footer

By David Hayes
how to automatically update copyright year WordPress

An out-of-date copyright year in a site’s footer is a common sight, especially early in a new year. It happens because people don’t take advantage of WordPress’s server-side language, PHP, to auto-update the copyright year in WordPress. Instead they’re manually changing it. But it’s a complex and menial task, so it’s easy to put off. […]

How to Migrate your Site with All-in-One WP Migration

By David Hayes

Migrating WordPress sites is a common and annoying task. Whether that’s between two different remote web servers, between a development server and production, or from production to local, there are lots of directions your WordPress site migration might flow. All-in-One WP Migration remains the tool of choice for us at WPShout most of the time. […]

How to Find and Remove Large Files on cPanel Hosting

By David Hayes
how to remove large files from cpanel

Most web hosts limit the amount of storage they’ll allow an individual hosting account. When you begin to run into these hosting disk space limits, your best bet is to find and remove large files from your hosting account that you’re no longer using. This week’s video tutorial explains how to find and remove large […]

How to Use FTP to Deactivate a Plugin That’s Breaking Your WordPress Site

By Fred Meyer
fix wordpress site stuck in maintenance mode

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to deactivate a WordPress plugin via FTP. When and Why to Use FTP to Disable a WordPress Plugin Why would you need to disable a WordPress plugin via FTP? The simple answer is that, if a plugin’s broken in a certain way, it will also […]