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 article explains what I’ve needed to know to work as a freelance WordPress developer.

This course covers the key points of two of WordPress’s most powerful APIs for defining custom post data: custom fields (also called post meta), and custom taxonomies. The course introduces each tool, and then—since some problems can be addressed by either tool—covers practical guidelines for when to use custom fields and when to use custom taxonomies.

This Cyber Monday deal roundup includes only WordPress products that we like, use, and recommend.

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.

WordPress’s get_queried_object() function has the distinction of being, I think, the most useful core function in WordPress that I didn’t know about for the longest time.

If you’re not clear how to undo changes in Beaver Builder, it can be difficult to know how to walk back a change you’ve made—specifically, how to undo Beaver Builder layout changes, for which normal “Ctrl+Z/Cmd+Z” undoing within Beaver Builder itself simply won’t work.

Getting started with WordPress development can be disorienting. As I’ve written, software development (including WordPress development) is a lot like caving, and trying to do your first WordPress development project can be like waking up somewhere in the middle of a dark cave and trying to figure it out from there.

Sometimes, you’ll look at a CSS, PHP, JavaScript, or other code or markup file, and see one or more empty lines between every line of actual content.

This free course on PHP for WordPress introduces the core topics you need to understand to practice the PHP side of WordPress development.