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.

Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system.

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

These are weird times. Like most people, David and I are at home, spending time with our spouses, reworking travel plans, and wondering how the rest of this spring and summer will play out.

Welcome to our free course on object-oriented PHP (OOPHP) for WordPress. This course explains the following:

When we think about “using a computer,” we usually think in terms of graphical user interfaces, or GUIs: interfaces (like Microsoft Word, the Mac OS, or the WordPress admin interface) that are specially and attractively designed, that have programs and windows and tabs that visibly open and close, and that let you click things and drag things and drop things and hover things.

This course covers one of WordPress’s most crucial and widely used systems: Hooks, including both actions and filters. We introduce Hooks as an event-driven system, present the key concepts and terminology you need to understand this system, and dig deep into how to use hooks in your own code—including hooking in your own functions, removing previously hooked functions, and creating your own action and filter hooks for others to use.

This course works to straighten out the many meanings of several key technical terms.

This Course teaches you how to use WordPress’s Widgets API, to both create WordPress widgets and register WordPress widget areas. If you’ve ever wanted to create widget areas (sidebars), or to fill your widget areas with custom-built widgets, this course is for you!