Organizing your content is one of the core features of a content-management system (CMS) like WordPress. As such, WordPress contains “taxonomies” to help you keep your content easy to find for both you and your visitors. Today we’re focused on why and how to make a WordPress custom taxonomy.

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.

It’s pretty common in WordPress: wanting to link to a section of a page. I remember fondly my first time [stares wistfully into the middle distance]. This Quick Guide explains how to do that, and how to then add that link to a navigation menu. Need to link users to a specific heading within an article?

This article explains what I’ve needed to know to work as a freelance WordPress developer.

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 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.

This Quick Guide covers a common question whose lingo may confuse newbies: how do I make a Bash shell alias? For those for whom that sentence was Greek—let start here: Bash is the “Bourne Again Shell.” (There’s not relationship to the Matt Damon movie character, for better or worse. ;p) In the world of “command line interfaces,” Bash has been the go-to standard for decades, and is still the most common “terminal” in use. In the “terminal” world, Bash aliases solve a common problem: wanting to do things quicker and more effectively. So we’ll quickly and effectively walk you through how to make BASH aliases.

It’s a common complaint when you run your WordPress site through any “page speed score” tool: “defer parsing of JavaScript” and/or “remove render-blocking JavaScript.” Today, building on an article Fred first wrote in 2015, I’m going to discuss a was to solve that. It’s been possible since WordPress 4.1, which introduced of a new filter, script_loader_tag. This filter lets us easily change the HTML markup of enqueued script elements—that is, of JavaScript files that were correctly added into a WordPress site using WordPress’s wp_enqueue_script function.

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.

Whether you’re writing about technical topics or something even more visually demanding like art, sometimes you just want to make a picture bigger in WordPress. That can mean a number of things, from how it appears on the page to what happens when you click it. We’ll shortly cover the first case, and then spend most of our time introducing using a “lightbox” from the Simple Lightbox plugin to make our images appear over our content in a large size when clicked.