Stylesheets are at the heart of making HTML pages look good, in WordPress and the web. And the way that we make CSS stylesheets load into the page in WordPress is using the wp_enqueue_style function. It’s not too complicated, but there a few common places that people new to using it will get tripped up. This Quick Guide will cover those, and then get you running in a step-by-step guide.

The WordPress excerpts system works properly, but it uses lots of functions and it’s hard to know which one does what.

Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the first and most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress site, but often grow to do even more. We’re hoping your find these free content very helpful, as we think it covers some of the most important concepts in doing WordPress theme development for yourself.

One of the first topics I ever wrote about on WPShout, I kind of thought that the topic of “theme creep” had died long ago. But a few times in the last few months–once with someone I’m mentoring in WordPress development, once with someone who was asking how to buy themes–I felt a need to mention this idea. So I’m revising and updating the original essays.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: the WordPress template hierarchy. It’s one of the most important concepts in all of WordPress theme development. (We have a full free course on the topic, check it out.)

Custom fields are one of the more powerful aspects of WordPress. They’re also, by default, victims of just about the worst interface ever designed. The idea of capturing and using metadata is great, but a better interface helps a ton. Keeping up my current infatuation with the Pods plugin, here’s how it can help you make great interfaces to WordPress post meta data.

Before we look at how to register WordPress custom shortcodes, let’s be clear: If there’s one thing Gutenberg is about to kill, it’s the use of WordPress shortcodes in content creation.

One of the hardest things about debugging or extending WordPress plugins is often simply finding where a piece of code lives. A plugin may have many thousands of lines of code across dozens of PHP files, organized however the plugin developers thought made sense to them.

WordPress template tags are a super-important and super-valuable part of WordPress, especially for theme development. They’re also one of the things I remember spending lots of time not quite getting as I was learning WordPress.

WordPress plugins can cause all kinds of errors: 500 internal server errors, PHP parse errors (also called syntax errors), errors that simply whitescreen your entire site, and more.