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.

I recently needed to modify a JavaScript file in a WordPress parent theme. The script was doing almost what I wanted, but not quite, so I wanted to make minor changes. In your case, you might want to entirely override a parent theme JavaScript file in your child theme, or even deactivate a parent theme JavaScript file altogether.

When I learned math, I didn’t really understand the modulus function. In fact, it was until I learned PHP that I understood the value of a remainder from division. PHP’s role in making websites makes the modulus operator (or modulo) much more important than it ever was in math class for me.

This video and text Quick Guide explains how to prevent browser caching of CSS files in WordPress. The CSS cache busting tricks here will work outside WordPress, too: you’ll just need your own method of adding query strings.

There’s a tricky thing about this idea, “WordPress add header script” I have written down as our topic today. That problem is that “adding a header script” can mean a bunch of things. In our case, I’ll be explaining how a WordPress user (who may be a developer, but doesn’t necessarily understand code that thoroughly) can add a JavaScript file or code to their pages.

This article covers how to include custom JavaScript and CSS files in WordPress. It’s a chapter from our outstanding WordPress course, Up and Running. If you want to become a knowledgeable WordPress developer, Up and Running is your best, clearest route to getting there.

Let’s talk about is_singular, one of WordPress’s more complicated template tags. In WordPress themes (and plugins too), we use “conditional tags” to control what shows up. This Quick Guides explains how to use the is_singular conditional tag in WordPress, as well the two other related ones: is_page and is_single. As you might guess, they all tell use something about whether or not there is one piece of WordPress content. If it is (a) singular piece of content 🤓

Learning WordPress development starts with a lot of key questions, including this one: “What language is WordPress written in?” Another common one is “Should I learn PHP or JavaScript first?” WordPress programming languages is a big topic, but we’ll cover all you need to get started.

After reviewing WordPress’s page builders in depth, I’ve found that Beaver Builder is my clear favorite, because it caters to people who want to do things right. Case in point: the Beaver Builder team have made it easy to add custom CSS styles to Beaver Builder elements. As with any front-end system, you can do a lot more with Beaver Builder if you understand CSS, and the software encourages this rather than trying to overcompensate for it.

Your author’s are the heart of most WordPress sites. They write your content, engage with your audience, and generally make the site work as it should. As such, you’ll often want to get WP author meta from the site so that you can show it off in your template. The way to get meta author tag information from WordPress is a handy function called get_the_author_meta (or, if you don’t need to do any processing, the_author_meta). Using this function is a great way to get the author meta fields from your WordPress users, and show those author fields in your WordPress theme templates.