The ability to update WordPress core, themes and plugins from within the Dashboard is quite amazing. It has taken a process that was at one time tedious and made it incredibly simple. Anyone can do it. All it takes is a few clicks and you’re running the latest versions of everything.

This article explains how to use WordPress’s HTTP API, a set of PHP functions from within WordPress’s function library, to make remote HTTP requests to external resources, such as JSON REST APIs.

This free WPShout Course is a step-by-step introduction to WP_Query, one of the most powerful systems in WordPess. By the end of the course, you’ll know what a WP_Query is, and how and why to use your own custom WP_Querys for theme and plugin development. It really is a revolutionary and powerful tool for every WordPress theme and plugin developer to master 🙂

The WP_Query class is an exceptionally powerful tool in WordPress. As you may know, every WordPress site contains a database that stores many posts (of many post types) that make up the bulk of that site’s content, and WP_Query is the best way to fetch or retrieve a given selection of those posts for processing. So your theme files use it on regular basis, and a lot of plugins on your WordPress site will it.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: WordPress hooks, including action hooks and filter hooks. Hooks are at the core not only of how WordPress plugins work, but nearly all code in the WordPress ecosystem: most WordPress themes use hooks heavily, as does “WordPress core” itself. WordPress hooks are absolutely a must-know topic in WordPress development.

About a month ago, I read a headline in the Post Status newsletter called “Let’s No-Code This Thing and All Go Home.” It linked to an article that stated:

This Quick Guide walks you through searching through all the files in a WordPress plugin using the Sublime Text code editor. This process works not only for searching through WordPress plugin folders, but for searching the contents of any folder using Sublime Text.

Today I want to dive into a kind of esoteric topic: WP option autoloading. It’s not something a lot of WordPress developers are likely to hit or to need. But vague knowledge of this topic saved me a bunch of time and confusion on a client project, so I want to help you understand how casual use of the update_option function without understanding WordPress’s autoload options feature can cause you pain and heartache.

This WordPress plugin development tutorial captures the steps I went through on a real project, including the mistakes I made and how I debugged them.

Sometimes, a developer will want to know why a WordPress site gets slow at a particular time, why their WP-Cron scheduled task isn’t working, or want to force one to run at off time. For all of these problems, the WP Crontrol plugin is the perfect tool. It’s a WordPress plugin to quickly debug your WP-Cron issues, all in one convenient place.