In this WordPress tutorial for PHP developers, we’ll look at how to start developing WordPress websites if you’re new to WordPress but already understand PHP.

When it’s time to choose a WordPress theme for your website, you have tons of options. Perhaps the most powerful is to forego the readymade themes on the market and build your own. Building your own theme puts you in complete control when it comes to looks and functionality. It can take your project up to that next level. That’s why today, we’re going to show you how to create a WordPress theme from scratch.

The topics of SQL and database performance optimization are important to a small percentage of WordPress sites. But when they matter, they matter a whole heck of a lot. It is in those situations that the WordPress plugin Query Monitor comes in. Maintained by John Blackbourn, Query Monitor is a great way to see what database queries were run on specific page of your site, and find out what the slow ones are. Once you find that, you’ve still got some work to do—tracking down the problematic query’s source, fixing the code that produced the query, etc—and unfortunately that work is far outside the scope of this little Quick Guide. All that said, let’s cover the basics of how to start to understand what’s going on with the WordPress Query Monitor plugin.

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to register custom taxonomies using the Pods plugin. Using Pods to create custom taxonomies is easy, and doesn’t require writing any PHP code of your own.

Say you have a category page on which you’re asked to display all the posts that belong to that category’s subcategories. So far no sweat – a category page displays by default all its descendant posts, whether they belong directly to that category or any of its subcategories. But here’s the twist: say you have to display them in such a way that the subcategory names are displayed (challenge no. 1), and under each subcategory’s name you have to display all its posts (challenge no. 2).

This text and video Quick Guide covers how to install WP-CLI, the WordPress command line interface.

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.

Making a widget to show a random post uses two underlying concepts you need to get familiar with to be good at WordPress development: making use of WP_Query objects, and making widgets. If you’ve not checked them before, check out our Quick Guides which more thoroughly introduce both:

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.

Strap in folks, this is a nerdy one. If you’re not already a little aware of the role of Git in your life, there’s a good chance that this article isn’t going to work for you. While I will make sure I anchor our conversation about Git Subtree’s use in my WordPress development with a little context of what Git is, it’ll be minimal. This is not a “Git” tutorial, it’s pretty explicitly a “git subtree” tutorial.