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

This week’s text and video Quick Guide shows how to use WordPress’s wp_footer action hook to make changes to your site’s footer—without editing your theme.

As Fred wrote in an earlier post, learning WordPress development is hard. It’s not just a case of being able to write code. There’s a heap of associated skills: analysis, design, SEO, copywriting, user experience, maintenance and more.

This article explains “server-side vs. client side” in WordPress development. This distinction, and how the server side and client side interact, is at the core of not only WordPress development, but of any real understanding of how the web works.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is amazing. It offers us an almost endless variety of functionalities that we can add to our websites with minimal effort.

This article is an in-depth WordPress shortcode tutorial. We cover what shortcodes are, when to use them, and how to register your own, with full-code custom shortcode examples.

There are a few things that you must understand about user roles and capabilities to be an effective administrator of a WordPress site: things like what a user is, how you make a new one, and what you’d make users for. There’s lots of value in covering those things, but our goal today is to really get a solid understanding of how the whole WordPress user management and role system works conceptually, and to cover a few of the most important ways of modifying it.

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 🙂